Five golden rules for getting your letters and emails read

Sometimes you have to write to customers, and sometimes you want to. Regardless, it is a surprisingly expensive exercise once you add the time it takes to plan the correspondence and the cost of copywriting, list management, legal, production, design and delivery.

Judging by those I receive as a customer and those I review for clients, most organisations try their best to get their emails and letters right. They look professional and read well. So why is it that so many bad news letters trigger complaints and cancellations, and good news letters get ignored? How can we stop wasting our time getting it so wrong?

Through the course of my work in behavioural economics I have developed some “golden rules of letter writing”, designed to get you the result you are looking for.