Gotta love them spelling nazis.
They’re so amusingly relentless and dogmatic in their zeal to ruthlessly eliminate ANY and EVERY misspelling… just because it exists.
Case in point:
A while back I wrote an email mocking spelling nazis.
And someone posted a link to an article proving me wrong.
The title was:
“Spelling mistakes
‘cost millions’
in lost online sales”
Wow!
Guess that’s an open-n-shut case, right?
Bzzt!
Not even close.
The article basically analyzed one website (that had a TON of problems) and cited a few ex-spurts and that was that.
A pathetically weak argument.
(To say the least.)
So here’s what I told him:
That link/study doesn’t confirm or prove anything.
Except, for course, the sales data for the 1 site they studied when they removed some typos (not even all of them, there must have been a lot). Plus, if you’ve seen their copy it’s lame, dry and boring. If it was written by real copywriters who know how to sell (and not just “writers” who don’t even know how to write very well) I doubt it’d matter nearly as much. Oh, and it still has some typos and problems (spacing, formatting, etc) even after “fixing” them. I can only imagine what it looked like before fixing it up when the study was done.
So that makes it kind of a straw man example.
(IMH – but always accurate – O).
In fact, here’s what’s on the first page as of today:
“This Seasons Hottest Trend”
Unless they do it differently across the pond, that should be “Season’s” not “Seasons”. So obviously, they have a lot of problems, and yeah, they need to clean up their act. That’s why my piece said it’d be stoopid to riddle your ads or emails with typos, but just don’t obsess over one or two that slip by the goalie. Because if you know how to write copy that sells, it won’t matter nearly as much as you think.
More:
How do you know a typo is “losing” you sales?
You don’t unless you split test it.
And few will bother doing that.
These things are often found out on complete accident.
For example:
Since writing that spelling nazis blog post at least 2 people have showed me examples how removing blatant “cringe worthy” typos (one which was in the headline!) hurt their response. So that’s further proof the study above is irrelevant to anyone else except the site being analyzed — which was a straw man example anyway, considering how many blatant problems there were with it.
Finally:
My post was about emails (mostly).
Not eCommerce catalog type sites.
It was about informal emails designed to sell.
If a business owner writes daily, personality-driven emails, customers will know, like and trust them and not think ‘oh scammer!’ because of a typo any more than they’d think their favorite radio talk show host is a scammer because he mispronounces a word. It’s only an issue to spelling nazis who either never buy or are complete pain-in-the-gluteus-assimus customers, anyway.
I’ve dealt with many of them over the years.
(Due to so many writers buying my products).
And you know what?
In my experience, they’re too busy looking for that one typo on page 346 than applying the info inside to fix whatever problem they bought the product to solve in the first place.
Kind of pathetic.
And, kind of of a shame, too.
After all… most of the truly great writers, editors and, yes, proof readers earn peanuts compared to even above-average salesmen and marketers who can’t spell to save their lives.
There’s a reason for that…
Anyway, never a dull moment, eh?
And here’s the good news:
If you happen to be a spelling nazi reading this… please don’t worry your anal retentive little head off.
It’s NOT too late to change your wicked ways.
Spelling nazism IS a curable disease.
And your lord and master Ben Settle is more than happy to roto-rooter out all those dumb ideas from your head and get you on the right track to email prosperity — where you make more of the green stuff writing out an imperfect email in 10 minutes than you are writing typo and grammar error-free emails in 10 hours now.
Don’t be afraid.
I promise it’ll only hurt a little.
And then after that…
You’ll wonder why you wasted so many years of your life obsessing over a little typo or two, and slap yourself silly for all the money you’ve been missing out on.
For immediate help, go to my hotline at:
Ben Settle
