KISS works best in emails – as I learned the hard way

By Alec Hogg

I got a really good lesson worth sharing in the art of email this week. We use Mailchimp to keep connected with the Biznews community. It’s an excellent system and apart from the occasional censorship of its users by Telkomsa.net (yes, only them) things go pretty smoothly.

As South Africans, our style is informal so our emails address community members by their first names. Unfortunately, for the past couple months a few thousand subscribers have started being called Dear “FirstName”. We’ve been trying to change this manually, but you’d be surprised how many people’s email addresses give little clue to their names.

So I emailed all the “FirstName” people on our list giving plenty of detail via screenshots. With the message eventually pointing them to the bottom of the page where each email we send carries a “manage your preferences” connection to each subscriber’s own record. Almost immediately I was hit with a deluge of accurate complaints that the links (in the screenshots) didn’t work.

Yesterday I sent another email with zero screenshots. It had a single “click here” link. Apart from two sarcastic responses, within minutes hundreds of people had done their own updates. Lesson learnt: The US Navy’s famous KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) works equally well for emails as it does with sailors.

From Deon Swanepoel

Dear Alec,

I felt to respond to two of your so enjoyable, to-the-point early morning (for me) reads:

Adrian Gore’s call for a return of Visionary Leadership refers, mostly because I believe it gives the longer, umbrella type insight that enables well thought-through, long term planning. His current 10% equity scheme for blacks who join the new bank is constitutionally good, but lacks long term, broad insight and I believe, will have an invisible negative effect on the size-potential of the enterprise. Sad.

Secondly, billions of dollars’ worth of financial aid programmes provided by countless governments, banks, businesses and financial aid organisations from across the world, has somehow largely failed to achieve the desired objective of creating sustained economic upliftment. Tragically most aid programmes only enhances attitudes of beggarly dependability seldom able to teach people how to turn aid into opportunity. Africa underwent major political transformation over the past decades but continued economic activity on inherited models which created an unacceptable imbalance. An imbalance that corrected itself by either reducing or destroying many economies on the African Continent – again confirming that when Macro environments change, Micro environments must adapt or die.

In South Africa, the Foundation accepted that unless we implement a New Economic Model to restore employee contentment and a settled, well-motivated workforce that reflects our Democracy in the World of Work, this imbalance will also continue to correct itself by eventually destroying itself.

GoHighLevel
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