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! 

The post How Grammar Mistakes Affect Email Communication: a New Survey appeared first on Linguix Blog.

Companies across multiple industries have been striving to boost diversity among their teams for decades. However, many leaders have realized that more can be done in terms of inclusivity. One of the most apparent parts of these efforts is promoting inclusive language in corporate communications, both internal and external. Unfortunately, multiple negative effects may be caused when employees use inappropriate language in their written communications, from linguistic racism to gender bias. 

In response to the rising problem, companies have started to deploy various solutions. As such, CVS Health enforced conscious inclusion workshops, Google began to nudge users to adopt the gender-neutral language, UK Finance, EY, and Microsoft launched an inclusion campaign.

In addition to any educational activity, many companies have introduced style guides, a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of documents, to eliminate using any gender-related descriptions of notions that have non-gender-related synonyms.  

Linguix Style Guides is a feature used by thousands of businesses worldwide. Today, we publish aggregated and depersonalized statistics that show what topics companies are covering in their style guides.

Disclaimer: no personal data was analyzed or accessed during the research. We’ve analyzed technical information and metadata on style guides rules and their activation only.

Methodology

We have 4156 style guides on the platform that took part in the research. We’ve analyzed the frequency of rules met in style guides. No content created by customers and their employees were analyzed as we do not store this data.

Based on the research, we were able to come up with three categories of the style guide rules enforcing:

• non-discriminatory language,
• correct branded language,
• proper English dialect usage (Mostly enforcing US spelling).

Here is what we’ve found by analyzing this data.

Key takeaways

Non-discriminatory language turned out to be the most popular purpose of corporate style guides (37% of guides covered this topic), while correct brand language enforcement was the #2 priority (21% of style guides solved this task). Also, many style guides administrators require their employees to use the correct English dialect, primarily enforcing US spelling (17%).

Most companies use Linguix to monitor external communications with customers, but some also use it internally to discourage employees from using the unwelcomed words in emails or Slack messages. That might mean avoiding gender-biased wording, prodding employees to think twice before they refer to a diverse group of people as “guys” instead of “team,” or use gendered words like “manpower” instead of “personnel” in their outgoing communications.

Here are some frequently used style rules focusing on gender-neutral language:

• businessman → businessperson, entrepreneur
• guys → team, everybody
• manpower → staffing, workforce, personnel, human resources
• foreman → supervisor
• middleman → contact person, go-between, broker, intermediary
• sister company → company, partner company, associated company
• man on the street → average person, ordinary person
• lady doctor → doctor

What else: brand safety

During the past year, we’ve also launched a bunch of demo projects helping the businesses worldwide to set up Linguix and create style guides for them based on the corporate requirements. Here are some interesting style guide use cases from such demos:

• One client in the IT industry used Linguix Style Guides to deter its employees from using the word “digitalization” to avoid sounding distant and too corporate.
• Also, companies try to remind their employees not to use political and national-related terms. For e.g., during Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh conflict escalation in 2021, some companies added the name of the disputed region to their style guides as a term to avoid.
• One Asian bank enforces its employees to use the People’s Republic of China instead of China and instead of Hong Kong – Hong Kong, China. Another style guide bans writing about Jammu and Kashmir to control geopolitical risks.  

Final thoughts

Our goal here at Linguix is to help our corporate users to communicate in ways that indicate competence and confidence at work. We believe that using Style Guides can help businesses to build healthier connections with their customers, and boost team morale by ensuring everyone within the company is happy with internal communications.

The post How Companies Use Linguix Style Guides: Inclusive Language, Correct Corporate Terms, Brand Safety appeared first on Linguix Blog.