Sales promotion letters

Sales promotion letters differ from newsletters in that

they do not have a neutral tone, they are more or less

explicitly persuading. They are unsolicited, you get them

whether you want them or not. Among the messages we

found three sales promotion letters, and they all fitted

quite well into the analysis made by Bhatia [4] on this

genre. A sales promotion letter is according to Bhatia an

unsolicited letter addressed to a selected group of

prospective customers in order to persuade them to buy

something. To accomplish this the letter must attract the

attention of the potential customers and then encourage

them to engage in further communication.

• Purpose: To persuade someone to by a product or

service

• Structure: According to Bhatia [4] there are seven

main elements of sales promotion letters, four of these

are:

− Establishing credentials, i.e. making the potential

customer confident of the expertise and credibility

of the seller;

− Introducing the offer;

− Offering incentives;

− Ending politely;

Messages 20, 52 and 58 are examples of sales letters,

with a structure that fits well into Bhatia’s description.

Message

with

the

speculative

sender

id

”makemoney@iwsc.com” starts with the following lines

to establish credentials:

We are an IBM Business Partner, and we will pay

you $25.00 to check out our company. No tricks.

We do not go into any detail here since the sales

promotion letters are out of the scope of this study. They

are mainly considered as junk mail, and do not contribute

to the work in the company.

Call for participation

Calls for participation in conferences and other kinds of

professional events could be considered as a specific

genre. We found three calls for participation in our

messages. A call is not demanding as is the case for the

different types of formal calls for participation e.g., a

calling-up order for military service or participation in a

court trial.

• Purpose: To attract people to engage in an event

• Structure: Usually contains the elements: Theme and

type of event (course, seminar, tutorial etc.), target

group, place, time, short descriptive text introducing

speaker and topic, agenda, price, a form for

registration;

The Digest

We have earlier discussed the role of conversation or

dialogue, and found that it is not a genre. However,

specific conversations in certain settings, with a specific

goal could be considered as genres. One example of this

is the different types of email conferences as discussion

groups and discussion lists. These have specific goals and

quite well established norms of behavior. A contribution

to a discussion group or discussion list could be a

separate message (eventually starting up a conversation)

or a part of an ongoing conversation. A conversation

within the discussion group is then threaded so that you

can follow the contributions to the discussion in a

sequence.

A genre relating to the discussion group/discussion

list is the digest. A digest is a merging of all or the best

contributions to a discussion group or a discussion list in

a specific time frame. It serves the purpose to inform

newcomers to the discussion group on what has been

going on, and to summarize for others what has been

discussed in the particular topic of the group. Messages nr

8 and 31 are examples of a moderated digest, the I-search

digest, a discussion list on understanding Internet search

technology.

• Purpose: To share professional information or

knowledge;

• Structure: Name of the list, name of the moderator (if

any), table of contents, each of the separate messages

in sequence;