On average, sales professionals send 36.2 emails per day and spend 31% of their working time writing them, which means they have only a few minutes to compose a message. No wonder that, due to such time limitations, many employees would just send emails “as is,” without any revision or re-reading.
As a result, typos or grammar mistakes often go unnoticed. And this problem has seemingly become a daunting one in corporate communications—there’re even lists of commonly misspelled words.
But the main question is: do typos in correspondence really affect your business?
According to Linguix’s fresh research, the answer is: yes, they do. Read on to learn how exactly and what you can do to minimize the negative effects.
Methodology
We have conducted a survey among 50,000 subscribers of our email newsletter. The respondents mostly hold sales, marketing, IT, and management positions.
In our survey, we asked a number of questions concerning people’s reactions to grammar mistakes and typos in the email subject line as well as in its main text, and whether they would like to continue doing business with a person who makes such mistakes.
Key takeaways
First, we wanted to figure out how mistakes or typos in the subject line affect the email open rate. It turned out that most respondents (75.4%) will still open such an email. However, a significant part (24.6%) consider an erroneous title a sound reason not to read the email.
Then, we asked the respondents if they usually reply to emails containing grammar mistakes and/or typos. The majority (73.7%) said they do, but there was also a large portion of those who don’t (26.3%.) This means each time your employee sends a message with grammar mistakes, almost a quarter of potential leads are cut off straight away. Quite a bit!
Another important question we posed was whether our subscribers would even do business with a person who sends them emails with grammar mistakes. And while 46.6% of the respondents didn’t consider this to be a problem, the majority of 53.4% were negative about the possibility of further cooperation.
Quick tips
As we can see, the issue of grammar mistakes in email correspondence is serious enough to hamper your business development. What can be done to improve the situation?
- Finding additional time for employees to review emails before sending them. In some cases, this will entail a reduced number of emails sent per day; however, in the long run, more qualitative messages might yield better results than the mere quantitative approach.
- Using email templates can help avoid mistakes in the subject line. But then, it’s crucial to make sure the template is 100% correct, otherwise, the mistake will be multiplied many times before it’s finally noticed.
- Adopting a writing assistant solution like Linguix can help dramatically reduce the number of typos and grammar mistakes: it takes just a few moments for an employee to correct them based on suggestions. Besides, such assistants are also capable of eliminating the language barrier when it comes to internal communications.
- Introducing a corporate style guide can both decrease the number of mistakes and help maintain the optimal tone of voice, which is another important factor in brand communication.
Email communication is one of the primary sales and marketing channels for many companies, and given the high price of typos and grammar mistakes, this issue is really worth addressing!