How Delivering Bread Is Like Writing an Email

I owned a Canada Bread franchise for almost ten years. I delivered over ten million loaves of bread. Every morning at 2am I’d be in the grocery store shelving bread so that when the store opened and customers came in, the section looked great. I am proud of what I did. Proud that every day that section of the grocery store was perfect.

I learned early on that people didn’t care about me or my efforts. People buy a loaf of bread and think nothing of it. It’s bread; it’s a staple of life. They think of bread as the thing that holds their sandwich together. It is something that gets slathered with an even better thing (like peanut butter). Bread is an afterthought. It’s just bread.

People only cared when something went wrong. If a loaf was expired, moldy, had an air pocket or was squished, the customers noticed and they weren’t shy about voicing how annoyed they were. The only time they focused on the bread was when something was wrong.

This is just like email.

Email is expected and happens every day. It’s just email. It does its job, nothing more nothing less. I receive hundreds of emails a day. Most I glance at, if I’m lucky. When there is an email I read, it stands out for two reasons. Either it’s something that interests me or it’s something I need to address in the course of running my business.

If someone is trying to sell something or connect with me via email, it drives me nuts when their righting about there product and a they’re is a gramaticial or spelling mitake…

…if you’re like me, that last sentence drove you nuts too.

If you’re making simple spelling mistakes or grammatical errors, this affects your quality of interaction with your customers. A customer pays attention and remembers a mistake.

If your client is like me, after reading your mistake ridden email, they won’t be thinking “Hey this is awesome and I really want to talk about this to learn more.” At best, they’ll think “Hey I’m not important enough for them to spell check their email.” to “Wow, this they can’t even get this right, would they be able to deliver a high-quality service or product to me.”

Email is a quick and efficient way to connect with many existing or potential customers around the world. But attention to detail is important. Different font types and colors or text styles throughout the email shows lack of professionalism and I can deduce that you cut and paste various templated messages with different size text to quickly put a boiler plate email together. Wrong names, spelling errors, odd characters or extra spaces between paragraphs are all memorable and will catch our attention – in a bad way.

When writing an email and you’re lucky enough to have the reader spend more than a second or two reading it, these mistakes kill any opportunity. Doing it right means the reader doesn’t think about the structure of the email and only focuses on the content.

You have limited time to be in front of a potential client. Use it wisely and make sure their focus isn’t on wondering why the email looks weird, but on the substance of your message.