Fear Not the BOGOman
This is a guest post from Sappho. If someone told me the world was going to end and I could only save a dozen of my favorite people, Sappho would be first amongst the list. She’s unbelievably smart but the truth is that her intelligence is not the reason I’d bring her along with me. When I say she’s quick-witted, we’re talking lightspeed snarky. I need a pause button when I am hanging with her — just so I can finish one laugh before beginning another. Oh, and for the record, she’s one hell of a copywriter too.
I recently had to stop a colleague from sending out an e-newsletter with the subject line, “B2G1 Roses.”
“But it’s a good deal,” he insisted. “People should know.”
I replied that it didn’t sound like a good deal; it sounded like a rejected character from the original Star Wars movie, which most of our customers did not see in 1977 because they were too old for it.
“But everybody knows what it means, right?” my colleague insisted.
I said that I hoped not, because if they did, the subject line would actually read, “Buy 2 Get 1 Roses,” which is a little too close to the actual experience many gardeners have with growing roses. So I suggested he spell out the words “Buy” and “Get,” then add the critical “Free” afterwards.
He agreed, but not without grumbling that my additions made the subject line “really long,” nearly exceeding the 6-word maximum limit recommended by market research. {Note from Amy: The golden rule about subject lines? There are no rules. You have to do what’s best for YOUR business.}
I probably would have forgotten about this little incident if it hadn’t gotten reinforced the following day when, on our way to the beach in a car crowded with fast-food bags and teenagers, my husband remarked irritably, “What is bogo milk and why do I want it?”
I looked up and read the announcement in front of a drugstore: BOGO Milk. Really? My tech-savvy (well, he has an iPhone) husband was blind to the ubiquity of BOGO? So I quickly asked the kids what the sign stood for. Both of them stopped texting long enough to tell me they didn’t know either (but were they being honest, or texting LMAO to their friends just seconds later?).
“It means buy one, get one,” I told my husband.
He laughed. “Well, there’s a concept.”
All of this reminded me uncomfortably of an ad my aunt had wrestled with in the local newspaper last summer. A computer-addicted septuagenarian who spends her leisure time outbidding the less nimble for antique quilt tops on eBay, she has shown me a thing or two about manipulating a PayPal account, but she was baffled by this part of an ad placed by her favorite Mexican restaurant:
Text El Jimador to 39756
Bring text to checkout & receive Special Discount
“There aren’t enough digits in the phone number,” was her first comment, followed by, “And whoever heard of printing out a text?”
Her solution, of course, was to carefully cut out the ad from the paper and wave it under the nose of the waiter at El Jimador, who made sure she got the Special Discount, in addition to the profuse apologies of the manager and a paper coupon for a free margarita on her next visit.
But are our e-commerce customers this lucky, or this persistent? Do we even know what they don’t understand about our cryptic subject lines and mysterious offers, or realize how we are disappointing them with our flights of verbal fancy? I confess that I was really excited when I received a recent email from the veterinarian with the subject line, “Activate Your Pet Portal Now.” Immediately I pictured some sort of tunnel — perhaps a huge pneumatic tube? — that could transport Spanky, Butter, Bob, and Goblin straight to the vet without pet carriers, shredded car upholstery, and those nasty fights in the waiting room. (Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be just an online recordkeeping system.) And just yesterday a cruise line promised me that I could “Sail from [my] backyard for less than $70/day,” which is pretty impressive considering I live 5 hours from the coast.
Anyone who has had to write large numbers of e-newsletters or churn out repetitive website headlines knows the temptation to come up with something, anything new to say — or, failing that, a new way to say the same old thing. It’s easy to forget that to our customers, phrases such as Buy 1 Get 1 Free are nothing short of poetry, and like all classic refrains, only improve with repetition.
Want to get a hold of Sappho? Write info@amyafrica.com. Yeah, that’s right. You have to go through me to get her e-mail address. Does the Colonel give out his secret KFC recipe? I think not. I promise I won’t charge you but there will be a comprehensive background check…
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Hi Sappho,
Thank you for the chuckles and a great reminder that what comes natural for some is a foreign language to others.
I’m so used to speaking “Twitter” that I tend to text “TY” for “Thank you”. After sending it a few times to my son, he asked, “Who is this Ty guy you keep texting me about?”
Lesson learned.
Hi Debra! Thank you for your kind words, and for reminding me about the strange gaps in our children’s knowledge as they simultaneously learn multiple languages: English, Text, Twitter, and the everchanging slang of actual spoken conversation. This was brought home to me in a chilling fashion last weekend:
One of my daughters has her Learner’s Permit, and I was pretty pleased with how she was handling the challenge of merging traffic — sliding boldly into a gap in the slow lane without all the head-twisting and brake-tapping I’ve come to expect — until, after she was safely in place and driving along, she asked, “What does Y-I-E-L-D stand for again?”
Great post, and great comment about your daughter as well. My 11-year-old litters her conversations with “BRB” and “LOL” but still manages to misspell simple words like “again.”
All the same, let me know when your daughter is on the roads, so that I can get off them.
Your daughter’s 11, eh? Your turn in the passenger seat of doom is coming fast . . .
It’s interesting to see how different kids are dealing with the onslaught of acronyms and emoticons. One of my daughters (not Miss Yield) refuses to use any acronyms in her texts because she started putting them in her schoolwork and got marked down. Now she’s on a campaign to spell everything out, and has even located the apostrophe on her phone. Meanwhile Miss Yield, who has always had a terrible time with spelling, relies on acronyms, numbers, and all other avoidance techniques.
Thanks for your comments!
Sherry, Sappho lives in South Carolina. Her daughter is likely one of the better drivers there!
Sappho,
Thank you for the heads up. My son starts drivers ed tomorrow, permit in January. I’m starting his language training with S-T-O-P!
Sherry, you might as well just stay off the road.
THSWTQ!
(Thank heavens Sappho wrote this qlog!) PUSA just DMC!
(er, people using stupid acronyms drive me crazy.)
LOL!
Dave Cleveland
LOL!
(Come on, you asked for it . . .)
Great post, Sappho! This is a nice reminder to keep offer statements, especially in subject lines, simple and clear to avoid alienating customers. And, I agree, the word free never gets old.
Also, unless you REALLY know them, it’s not “cute” to assume your customer understands any given lingo.
For example, here’s a recent subject line I received from a dining establishment (with restaurants all over the eastern US – north to south): “A “2-Fer” You Don’t Want to Miss”
Okay so the slanguage is in quotes and is less cryptic than B2G1, but really? Am I supposed open because I’m in the south and should be excited about a “2-Fer” deal? Hmph.
Thank you so much for the comments, Ashley! I think I may have gotten that same “2-fer” email . . . And what about subject lines that mention company anniversaries or personify their mascots to sell us something? Do they really think we remember who Snappy is or care that someone has been in business exactly 5 years now? Just hand us the discount, please!
I’m with Sappho 100% on this subject.
In curiosity, conducting a test of my own, after reading this post I emailed my husband to ask him if he knew what “BOGO” meant. He emailed back a reply minutes later to say, “It means the same as BOGOF.”
He then followed that up with a phone call to obsess about where exactly HE fell in Amy’s top 12 people, as I had made the tragic error in judgment of forwarding him the Qlog to read. (Sorry, Amy, I should have known better…)
Once he finished ranting about that, however, and I got a word in edgewise, I asked him how it was he knew about BOGO and he replied, “I googled it.”
So, in fact he hadn’t known it, he looked it up.
My husband is quite smart (granted I’m prejudiced but…) He knows a lot of obscure trivia across a broad range of subjects, he can out-lawyer a lawyer on contracts, he’s internet savvy and a huge online shopper. (I have the credit card bills to prove it.) And he didn’t know what BOGO meant. I feel reasonably certain he wouldn’t know what B2G1 means, either. (Well, he would after he googled it.)
The roundabout point to this story goes back to the colleague who insisted, “But everyone knows what it means, right?”
Who’s “everyone?” And why risk the assumption about what “everyone” does and doesn’t know?
KISS!
p.s. everyone knows that’s not an actual kiss, right?
Well, there you have it. All the BOGOs, BOGOFs, and B2G1s pinging into our Inboxes and blighting our billboards are not only ineffective, they’re actually invisible to customers who don’t know what they mean!
By the way, Lynn, I know without even asking Amy that in this apocalyptic scenario she’s envisioned, your husband isn’t in the top 12 people she has to save because he’s probably the one who has designed, built, and is preparing to activate our escape mechanism!