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Number
45: March 24, 2004
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This week in Katydid:
Making
a Positive First Impression
As someone who writes for a living, you'd think I'd have faith in the
power of written language, but when it comes to e-mail, I'm less
trusting. In our business, we interact with many people each day, and
often that first communication is through e-mail. However, if your
business depends on building relationships quickly with new contacts,
you may want to reconsider your process.
A recent
article by Marina Krakovsky in Psychology Today shows how
e-mail can go wrong. The article discusses a study by Janice Nadler of
Northwestern University to be published in the Harvard
Negotiation Law Review. The study followed a group of
participants negotiating the purchase of a car through e-mail. Half the
participants also picked up the phone before the exchange to introduce
themselves.
"Negotiators who first chatted by phone were more than four
times likelier to reach an agreement than those who used only e-mail.
… Subjects who never spoke were not only more likely to hit an
impasse but they often felt resentful and angry about the
negotiation." ("The Pitfalls of E-mail," March/April
2004, p15).
It's not just the courtesies of saying, "Hi," or the
brusqueness of the communication. It's the fact that if the reader
doesn't know your personality, all they have to project onto your
message is their own personality. And if you remember anything from that
undergrad psych class, it's that we don't usually project our positive
qualities onto others.
So, when there's a short message, it seems terse. A long message
might seem patronizing. There's rarely going to be a just right because
of our natural tendency to affirm our worst fears.
Something similar happened after another major technological
innovation - the Post-it®
Note. The Post-it allowed you to avoid those annoying casual
conversations and simply slap your demands onto desktops, screens, and
doorjambs. These were about as welcome as the note on the fridge saying,
"Take Out The Trash" (Always underlined – three times).
Just a little bit of personal interaction is enough to defuse the
problem, which is fine if you have that opportunity. However, if you
know that readers may misinterpret your meaning, what can marketers do
to improve their e-mail marketing results?
The clue in the Northwestern University study is that results were
better when participants had a chance to get to know each other. More
specifically, they were able to connect with the other's personality.
With e-mail communication, the tendency is to be formal in order to
sound more professional. But that very formality comes off as stiff and
uncompromising. Additionally, there's a strong desire to explain
oneself, so one adds a lot of exposition. This comes off as patronizing
and pedantic.
Therefore, you'll want to work against those tendencies in order to
let more of your personality shine through. You can use less formal
language. (You don't need to go so far as to use smileys.)
In e-mail, the goal is usually to request some kind of action – a reply
at the very least. Therefore, you can safely leave some details for
future communications.
If you're using HTML e-mail, you can add personality through
judicious use of color and graphics. Too formal a presentation might
make you seem overly corporate; too sloppy a design and you'll look like
spam. Focus on clean, simple design. Lots of negative (open) space makes
the e-mail easy to read and makes your personality seem more open and
inviting.
Finally, remember that your brand has a personality, which may serve
as that introductory phone call. If you've created a fun, approachable
brand, you can leverage that to increase response to your e-mail
programs. And if it has even an outside chance of quadrupling results,
you know we're going to try it.
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Kind regards,
Kevin Troy Darling
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