You’ve heard the phrase, ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth,’ but what about this one:

Too many words spoil the content. 

Words are potent things. They can motivate, inspire, bring about change and have a tangible impact on us. But, these days, a lot of the ways we end up using words are overly complicated. Sentences are stuffed with jargon, new corporate buzzwords seem to pop up every day, and big words are stuffing themselves into spaces that small words could happily fill. 

It's off-putting and alienating, as well as a big time-waster – not just for the writer, but for the reader, too. 

True, words are great for SEO. Content is king, after all, and regular comms are key to the success of any customer incentive programme. But it’s always been about quality, and it always will be. Words that are big on meaning, small on wasted syllables, are always going to perform best with human audiences, and insight the most action.

It’s All About Balance

Most readers on the web get about 60% of the way through an article, which means actually reaching the end is relatively rare. 

Cutting all the big words and long sentences out of copy isn’t the answer. Why? Because small sentences get boring. They sound robotic. Really robotic. We read them like robots. Our eyes glaze over. Everything falls flat. 

It’s tough to infuse small sentences with any distinctive brand voice or emotion if they’re all three to four words long. But you’ll also run into problems if you string too many long sentences, stuffed full of extra clauses (or bracketed items) and tacked onto the next sentence with a semicolon; it’s unnecessary, especially when the full-stop button is right there, free to use, under your little finger. 

The key is balance. This is true whether you’re looking at content on a sentence-by-sentence level, or whether you’re panning out and surveying the ways in which you use content to engage and keep those channels of communication open. 

We all want to communicate with our customers regularly enough that we hold a more prominent position in their minds than competitors. We want our comms to feel personalised, relevant, timely, and attention-grabbing, but we also don’t want to overdo the little reminders, notifications, emails and pop-up messages. There are many different reasons why customers unsubscribe from email lists, but two of the most consistent are 

• Too many emails
  In fact, almost 70% of customers will unsubscribe if they think a brand is overdoing their comms. 
  
  
• Too much repetition
  Who likes to be told the same thing over and over again? Not your customers. The ‘bombardment mentality’ is common among new businesses that want to make a splash, but it’s not going to get you anywhere in the long run. 
  
  

The best comms are made with clear intent. Recipients shouldn’t be led to think that you’re taking advantage of those direct lines between you. They should feel motivated and genuinely interested in what you wrote about. 

The Importance of (Balanced) Comms for Your Loyalty Programme

Good B2B communication is fundamental to the success of your loyalty programme. We wrote about its importance recently in our guide to the ABCCs of customer loyalty, and how it’s as essential as stakeholder buy-in, clarity, good rewards or a clear system for points allocation. 

Well-timed B2B communications through marketing channels like email, social media, and your loyalty platform will give that extra boost of motivation to customers, and keep them in the loop about opportunities to win points (say, a quiz or event they can sign up to through the platform). 

So, where’s the ideal balance? 

As you can imagine, our Incentivesmarties have put a lot of thought into this. In fact, communications are now an intrinsic part of our loyalty platforms, there to carefully measure one pop-up reminder against the next email or key update posted within your brand’s News Area. 

The Foundations of Good Communication

All programmes need to make just the right amount of noise, and that’s one of the things that makes our loyalty platform so effective. 

The right words, in the right way, sent and received at the right times. It’s a fine art, but one that we’ve spent a lot of time perfecting here at Incentivesmart.