The genre structure of promotional letters in English

Abstract

Understanding communication styles is an important strategy in intercultural business communication as more and more countries are involved in doing business internationally in general and doing business with Vietnam in particular. One of the most effective forms of communication in business to promote products is sales promotion letters or sales letters. This article aims to understand the structural moves used in English sales promotion letters to discover the basic marketing strategies of companies in Englishspeaking countries. Thus a corpus of 60 English promotional letters was collected from official homepages of companies, banks in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. The study combined genre analysis method, methods of describing and classifying to estimate the number and the frequency of moves and steps in the genre structure of promotional letters to discover the most effective move structure of English sales promotion letters used in marketing strategies of English-speaking companies to support companies in Vietnam as the Vietnamese economy is becoming increasingly privatized.