Today’s “lesson” is mayhap too simple to even call it a lesson. Well, it should be too simple to call it a lesson. Alas, I’ve simply seen this mistake being committed far too often in the past few minutes to believe that people ever even learnt this lesson from the illustrious hallways of good ol’ Copywriting 101.
The lesson?
Stop using jargon.
It’s that simple.
In fact, if you were to only follow one maxim of copywriting, this one might just be the one that makes the biggest dent in all of your marketing efforts.
Why?
Because nobody except you understands your jargon, your obscure acronyms, and your worthless abbreviations.
Just in the past two minutes alone, I saw emails with jargon like CBDCs and GTMs in it.
Let’s focus on the GTMs because CBDCs was surprisingly easy to decipher (despite me thinking it was some new kind of CBD cure-all).
GTMs is a certain kind of unique-selling proposition (USP—hah! how’s that for using marketing jargon) from some guy who’s list I found myself accidentally subscribed to. I don’t know this man, haven’t opened any emails from him, and yet, his ignorance of copywriting 101 made me open, seethe, then unsubscribe.
For one simple fact: I have no idea what GTM means.
Does it mean Google Tag Manager?
Maybe.
Does it mean Go-To-Market?
It could.
Which therein lies the problem with disobeying this rule:
Confusion is the death of the sale.
If you don’t know what a certain acronym means, then, well, it’s on you to figure it out. This leads to a Google search and either an easy answer or multiple possible explanations. Not only is this confusion a telltale sign of bad marketing, but another death of sales is distractions—and if’n you send someone to Google with nothing more than a few capitalized letters to try to transcribe what you meant, then, well, they’re one click away from finding themselves in an endless sea of distractions where your silly acronym you used to sound like an expert gets memory-holed forever.
If they don’t get distracted and instead just can’t figure out what your three-letter acronym means, then they get frustrated. And frustrated folk are more likely to smash that pesky unsubscribe button and do their damndest to ruin your deliverability.
Moral of the story?
If you’re gonna use jargon, make sure you at least explain it.
But it’s better to avoid jargon completely because it ruins the general experience people have with your emails. The general experience is how you create relationships with the people on your list—and relationships are how you turn leads into customers, customers into repeat customers, and repeat customers into diehard loyalists.
So, put your ego aside before you use jargon to try to trick people into how smart you are—and instead, focus on your customers, their particular problems, and how your products or services ease and eliminate those particular problems.
PSA over.
Need help improving your email deliverability, impact, and revenue?
Hit reply, and let’s find a time to talk bidness.
John
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