Posted by Mina on Dec 16, 2011 in Small Business Magnus News
"Spelling mistakes 'cost millions' in lost online sales" stated a BBC News Education headline on 14th July (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14130854). The article featured an 'online entrepreneur' who suggested that misspellings put off consumers who might have concerns about a website's credibilityIt turns out that this pronouncement was based on research on one website, which showed that revenue per visitor doubled after a spelling mistake was corrected, a finding that the entrepreneur projected across the entire internet to arrive at his '£millions in lost sales' figure. But the very fact that the BBC saw fit to run this headline highlights a legitimate concern that many people have.
Typos and spelling mistakes do indeed jeopardise your credibility, and this may well translate into lost sales, especially online, where your competitors are only a click away and you get about six seconds to capture visitors attention. Errors make you look unprofessional - as if you just don't care. Who wants to do business with a company that doesn't care? And yes, readers, even attention-challenged online ones, do notice such things - there are whole websites devoted to poking fun at typos.
Spell checkers do not spot errors like from/form, you/your, their/there, then/than etc. A spell checker won't save you from some potentially embarrassing mistakes either - like Office Manger for Office Manager or Pubic Performance for Public Performance.
If you are starting a small business, do not have any office space and your website is your main place of business, it needs to be as professional looking as you can possibly make it - and that means eliminating those typos and other errors. If you rely on a newsletter to keep you in customers' minds, then make sure you are remembered for the right reasons, not because it is littered with typos.
According to Murphy's Law, any piece of writing discussing spelling or grammar errors will have at least one spelling or grammatical error itself! I don't suppose any of us can buck that brend !!