5 ways plain language helps your bottom line

Plain language is an approach to communications that focuses on making information easy to read, understand, and use. Adopting plain language in your business may sound like a lot of work, but the returns are often far beyond anything the business imagined. Here are some areas where using plain language can help your business’s bottom line.

1. Product information: How easy is it to do business with you? Your website should be so clear that potential customers understand what you offer, how much it costs, and how to purchase it, without needing to search for information. This requires a combination of strong, clear writing and intuitive design—both parts of plain language. Once someone clicks away from your website, you’ve likely lost the sale.

2. Contracts and agreements: Contracts have a longstanding reputation for being impossible to understand without the help of a lawyer. They don’t need to be this way! A plain language contract lets everyone understand what they’re being asked to agree to. It inspires confidence and trust in your business, because clients won’t worry that you’re trying to trick them.

Royal Insurance of Canada had a 38% increase in sales when
plain language was used ​in their homeowners’ insurance policies.
–Northwest Territories Literary Council 

3. Customer inquiries and complaints: If your website, agreements, and marketing materials are clear and easy to navigate, customers and potential customers will find the information they need on their own. This saves your staff countless hours of answering email and phone inquiries and being asked the same questions again and again. Also, making your policies clear to begin with (instead of burying them in legalese fine print) means that people understand what they’re getting. This will reduce the number of complaints, returns, and requests for refunds.

4. Forms: If you collect information using forms (for subscriptions or registrations, for example), they should be clear and easy to fill out correctly. This will cut way back on the number of mistakes in them and the need to follow up one-by-one to get the information you need. Alberta Agriculture used plain language to revise their forms and found that "with 1,034,530 forms processed a year, and savings in staff time of at least 10 minutes per form … the annual saving to the government is an astounding $3,472,014.” 

5. Staff communications: How much time do your employees spend reading poorly written, unclear, or unnecessarily long emails, reports, updates, and procedures? How complicated is the process of booking vacation time, filling in insurance claims, or submitting their hours worked? Plain language can reduce the amount of unproductive time that staff spend on internal tasks, and also improve morale by making it easier for them to do what they were hired to do.
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Starting with one or two key documents or communications tools can put your business on the path to less wasted time, more sales, and a stronger bottom line. Get in touch with me to discuss where to begin.