I'm sure we all get email that, while legitimate, is just crappy. The solicitor just talks about themselves: "We", "Our", "I", etc. It's always focused on the company, a product, or some combination of those things.
"We have this thing and it can do all sorts of neat stuff...", blah, blah, blah...
I have one from a little over a year ago that I've held on to for some reason, because it was just so bad.
Dear NWLEAN members,
As the developers of AccuStudy time and work measurement software, we want to be a part of your lean manufacturing and process improvement efforts. Our focus is on providing you with state of the art tools and resources.
While time studies continue to be an important part of process evaluation, traditional approaches using stopwatch and clipboard make the effort time consuming and tedious. If you have a moment to visit our web site at www.intervalsystems.com, we believe you’ll agree that AccuStudy is a fundamental advancement in process evaluation --- allowing you to receive accurate and compelling real-time data on process bottlenecks, non-value activity, and potential process improvements.
We’ve built AccuStudy with a very intuitive approach to data collection, using a hand held computer containing hundreds of icons representing manufacturing and assembly tasks. We’ve combined this icon approach to data collection with a powerful set of PC based analytic tools. After uploading the hand-held computer data to a desktop or notebook PC, you can choose from a set of predefined reports or export the data to Excel for further analysis. The learning curve for the entire product is a matter of minutes.
From our home page you can download a set of free product demonstrations . We hope you’ll take a moment to look us over.
Thanks for letting us interrupt your day with this note and we wish you the best for 2004.
This seems like a great tool, but I wonder what the yeild was from this type of email?
I decided to take 5 minutes to see if I could improve it... here you go:
Introducing a free how-to guide: "The Lean Managers Guide to Using Time & Work Measurement Studies to Improve Performance"
- Are you concerned about Process Bottlenecks?
- Would you like to improve your process performance?
- Would you like to know if your employees are spending too much time on non-value added activities?
If so, download the new whitepaper: "The Lean Managers Guide to Using Time & Work Measurement Studies to Improve Performance"
You'll discover:
- Why Stopwatch & Clipboard Efforts yield less than optimum results
- 3 key steps to collecting the right data to improve performance
- And so much more...
Don't let another minute of less than optimum perfomance go by: Download your free copy today!
Not great. But the same basic text... AND nothing about the company or the product, which people don't care about anyway... I'd be willing to bet that if they can give something away for free - add a little value to peoples lives - they'd have a much easier time getting people to look at their software.
This is just one example - I get stuff like this all the time, as I'm sure you do. People sending emails talking about the offering (book, software, service) they have, and how I should really look at it. Stupid. Most of these end up in the trash pretty quickly.
Companies forget that there is a recipient of the message they're sending - and that person cares far more about themselves than they do about you or your product.
Ha! I guess it all goes back to the "What's in it for me" question, huh? Not a bad filter to apply to messages before they're sent out - these companies should ask if there is something in it for the recipient or not.
So, do you have examples like this? Good emails? Bad emails? Have you ever sent one back to the sender - with a suggestion on how to improve it?
