Being Pleased with Your Announcement is not Enough

Read this ineffective email announcement and beware. It was sent by a local non-profit organization. Read it and see if you can decipher what they want from the receiver.

Check your interest level, thoughts and emotions as you read this. Of course that’s what you need to do before you ever send an email like this. Certain words have been edited out (substituted with xxx) to protect the guilty.


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It is with great pleasure that we announce the launch of the xxx xxx webpage on our website.

We are fortunate to have some amazing xxx in xxx who have agreed to share their views on what it means for them to be a xxx.

We are pleased to showcase these individuals who have made it their priority to instil work ethics and essential skills, by providing valuable xxx opportunities to our future workforce across a variety of economic sectors.

We invite you to read their stories and hope that you will be inspired to join the thousands of xxx, who believe that knowledge-transfer and xxx are the key to the growth of our economy and our community.To view the xxx page please visit, xxx

Thank you
Name
Title
Organization

What do they want the reader of this message to do? Do they want people to visit their webpage? If so why? What’s the benefit to the reader? If that was the desired action why was it in the fourth paragraph after four boring and send focused paragraphs?

Let’s examine the lame language in this announcement.

“It is with great pleasure that we announce”

Boring, cliché and lame. Why would the receiver of this message care about the sender’s pleasure or announcement?

“We are pleased to showcase”

Why would the receiver care what pleases the sender?

And I left the typo “instil” as it appeared.

“We invite you”

Invite might be a good word to use but the rest of this run-on sentence/paragraph is vague, confusing and boring. What does it mean “to join the thousands”? Do they want money, a signature on a petition or a like on Facebook?

This non-profit organization might end up complaining that people are complacent. I wonder if they will ever consider that perhaps, they haven’t done their homework. They haven’t learned what motivates their market and they haven’t stated their message clearly.

The message needs to be about your audience - not about you.


George Torok

Marketing Speaker