Do you exist?

It is an easy mistake to assume that the knowledge and beliefs you have are shared by those who read your adverts.

Last night, at a club in the Pump Room at Royal Leamington Spa, a woman asked me to dance.

After the dance she made the point that she'd not seen me at this particular venue before, and I admitted that on this occasion I had travelled out of my normal orbit.

"Where are you based?" she asked.

"The Rutland / Northants border," I said.

She pondered this for a while. “One has heard of Rutland, of course," she said, "but does such a place really exist? Has its existence ever been proved? I suspect not.”

And this reminded me how easy it is in adverts to assume that the reader knows exactly what you are talking about, when in fact he or she might not have a clue.

This is why, when writing an email one needs to focus on the benefits one’s product or service brings to the reader, and write about those benefits from the reader’s point of view.

That way one can leave the features and all the technical details for the web page. “Excite the reader with the great benefits that your product or service will bring to them,” - that is the way to write advertisements these days!

As for the tricky issue of what is a benefit and what is a feature - I shall return to that in a future transmission. But for now, adieu.