Page 109 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

48 BE DIFFERENT

Pick any category of copywriting—promotional emails, flyers,
mailshots, e-zines—and it’s a fair bet that the last 50 examples
you’ve seen (let’s not say written) are, effectively, the same. Same
format, same structure, same style, even the same benefits. Which
is a bad thing. Why?

Because our readers, poor suffering souls, get hit with this stuff
day in, day out. And it’s boring. Somebody once asked me in
a copywriting workshop why it was a bad idea to start a letter to
customers, “As a valued customer.” “I got one this morning that
started like that,” she said, “from an online chocolate retailer. And
one yesterday.” My point exactly.

The idea

From a government department
BLU (sadly no longer around) was a business unit with the Small
Business Service of the Department of Trade and Industry. Got
that? It provided publications, events, knowledge management, and
networking to the myriad organizations in Britain that themselves
support enterprise, from chambers of commerce to local outfits
called Business Links. Our job as their marketing agency was to
write, edit, design, and print . . . everything. Flyers, emails, ads,
white papers, reports, mailshots, posters, certificates, you name it.

Trouble is, there was an awful lot of printed material flying around
“the network” at the time and information overload was an ever-
present danger. When one particular working party finished its
research program, we decided on a different approach. Rather than

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