No man is an iland

Removing attention barriers is important: it gets you…um…attention, which has its own benefits (like the nudge effect).

But if you want more direct email action, don’t lose sight of the foundation behind most email-related response: the core value you offer.

Do we lose sight of value’s role? Yes.

What you see when you look at your email:

 
 
What your readers see:

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• Channel: Email strategy

There’s a lot of real value in hidden treasure.

The trouble is the “hidden” part.

If you’ve no map, no machete or no burly assistant willing to chop down lianas until dusk, then the treasure stays hidden: its effective value is a big fat zero.

So it is, unfortunately, with email.

You work hard to deliver promotions and content that people want. Emails with real value. But all too often, we put up attention barriers that prevent people from finding that value.

So what are the obstacles we need to watch for?

People have limited attention to spare.

They focus on those messages perceived as deserving that attention: messages that are clearly important, personal or something they want and expect.

With marketing emails, then, most of the attention barriers arise when the recipient doesn’t recognize that the email you send is one they want and expect.

Ensuring recognition is therefore vital to email success.

Improve recognition through sign-up practices

One of the roles of your sign-up process is to help encourage a frame of mind that makes recipients more likely to tune in to future messages.

Three useful tactics here are:

1. Give a clear indication of the value of your emails

My machete-wielding assistant is far less likely to put in a decent shift of work if the buried treasure consists of two wooden spoons and an IOU note.

Sell the value of your emails in sign-up forms and/or sign-up pages: you should do this anyway to give people a reason to subscribe in the first place.

Consider, also, reemphasizing that value on the sign-up confirmation page.

Rather than the typical “You have been subscribed” message dreamed up by IT in a fit of creative torpor, why not something like:

“Thanks for signing up. Expect an extra-special email-only discount on your favorite products very soon!”

(I’m not a copywriter but you know what I mean.)

2. Show a sample email

You might consider putting up a screenshot of a sample email on that confirmation page, too, so people know what to look for. Here’s an old example.

3. Send a welcome email or welcome series of emails

Your organization or brand is top of mind at the moment someone submits their email address. So an email sent immediately afterwards already has a likely attention bonus.

Indeed, stats show that such welcome emails often get among the highest opens of any email program.

In the mind of the recipient, the welcome message can establish the from line, subject line style and design elements that characterize all your future emails…setting a pattern of recognition for future messages.

You can also use the welcome message to reinforce the value of future emails, either indirectly (by describing them) or directly (by already including such value, for example by linking to “best of” articles or including a special offer, coupon, bonus etc.)

Improve recognition through timing

It seems reasonable to assume people are more likely to give your emails attention when:

• they have the time to read and act on the contents, or
• they were already thinking of you, or
• they can at least remember who you are and why they get these emails

Even without the benefits of test results and experience, common sense tells us there are some clear lessons there for timing and frequency.

4. Send often enough not to be forgotten

There are no hard and fast rules, but sending fewer than one mail a month seems unlikely to give you a gold star for awareness building.

Once the gap between emails grows to a few months, people will start forgetting they even signed up. Your problem moves beyond one of recognition to permission issues.

5. Watch the time between sign-up and the first email

Ideally you’re sending a welcome email anyway. But if you’re collecting addresses prior to starting up a new email program, don’t let the gap before the first email grow too long or the problems outlined above apply.

6. Time emails to moments of interaction

When a recipient interacts with your organization – calls customer service, browses a website, abandons a shopping cart, purchases a product, registers for an event – they are telling you that you’re sitting at the top of their mind and, more or less, why this is so.

That’s the premise behind the proven success of trigger emails.

These take advantage of this attention bonus and recipient intelligence to follow such interactions with a related message that (by definition) delivers timely, valuable offers, content or service messaging.

7. Find the right day of month, day of week and time of day for reader attention and response

There is no best time to send AN email, but there may be a best time and day to send YOUR emails. For retail emails, Claire Rollinson suggests you simply send at the time most people get paid.

Improve recognition through your from and subject lines

The very best from and subject lines work together to achieve three things:

• Get recognition, so the recipient takes the trouble to look closer at the subject line
• Raise interest, so the recipient takes the trouble to look closer at the actual body of the email
• Encourage action, by putting the recipient in the frame of mind to respond

Successful from/subject line combinations don’t have to do all three to work, but that’s a goal. Think of them as the map that leads to that buried treasure.

X marks the spot.

I’ve probably written more on this topic than any other, so for an in-depth treatment, see here.

From an attention viewpoint, though, some basic suggestions:

8. Include an identifier in the from or subject line (or both)

The from line should normally be the name most familiar to the recipient. This might be the organization, the brand, the newsletter title, the account manager…whatever works best.

You might also consider branding the subject line, as this has been shown to increase opens.

9. Give people a clue to the contents

Those senders with a super reputation, strong brand and long history of sending highly valuable emails can get away with from and subject lines that do nothing but identify the sender, e.g.:

From: Brand X
Subject: July Newsletter

Despite what we’d all like to think, most of us are not in that situation.

The from/subject combo needs to identify a recognizable sender and give people a reason to explore the email further. That’s where all the subject line advice comes in.

10. Avoid trust killers

You can sometimes gain a quick open rate boost through subject line tricks and teasers.

Use these with care to ensure you don’t tip the balance into deception (often illegal under email law) or raise expectations unduly only to shatter them in the actual body of the email: that trains readers to ignore your emails as untrustworthy.

An example might be adding “Re:” to the start of your subject line, suggesting you are continuing a conversation initiated by the recipient…even though it wasn’t.

Does it work? Maybe.

Is it ethical? Maybe not.

Does it build trust? Probably not. (I automatically delete emails that do this.)

Improve recognition through the preview

Many email and webmail clients give recipients a sneak preview of an email’s content.

This preview may be as little as a line of text appended to subject lines in the inbox (like Gmail does). Or it may be a narrow window (the so-called preview pane) displaying the first few lines of the email itself, as Hotmail and Yahoo do.

11. Include text and images that prompt recognition

Preview panes can be various sizes and shapes, but the top left area of your message is the most critical.

The top of your email needs preheader text, a logo, a brand name, a slogan, brand-compliant design…whatever triggers quick recognition among your readers.

Equally, don’t fill up the lead into your email purely with recognition elements. People also want to see the value/offer/content quickly, too…otherwise attention is short-lived.

This is a particular issue on mobile devices, where smaller screens can quickly fill up with a logo and generic introductory text.

12. Avoid attention killers in the preview area

Another aspect of this preview area is to ensure it contains no elements that the recipient might infer to mean the message is irrelevant or requires too much time/energy to digest.

One example might be your salutation: test whether your generic or fallback salutation is putting off readers? For example:

• Dear friend (if I’m not your friend, do I continue reading?)
• Dear customer (if I’m not an actual customer, do I continue reading?)

Another example are giant images spanning the width of the email’s top, pushing the actual content down outside the view of the typical preview pane or even below the fold on a fully-opened email.

Not everyone will make the effort to scroll down past this image, especially if it is prevented from displaying (as often happens).

Make it smaller, or use an alt attribute to encourage attention and interest, or preface it with relevant text, or discard it entirely and think again.

Make it easy for people to find the value

Don’t forget that with all our preheaders, logos, images, sidebars, “share this” links, teasers and footers it has to be easy for people to find the actual offer or content.

13. Don’t bury the content

When people look at your email, you want them to perceive the task of finding the value to be as easy as possible. (Unless you’re running some creative, engaging, “can-you-find-the-rabbit?”-like campaign).

That means making the core offer/content obvious.

As Gretchen Scheiman writes:

“The offer is your hero…Make sure your offer is easy to
understand, and give it prime billing in your email.”

It also means making the process of negotiating your way through the email easy: clear headlines, plenty of white space, use of highlighting, bullet points, helpful imagery and, as I might have mentioned before, short paragraphs of text.

Don’t coast

Of course, attention is itself driven by the value you offer through your email. The more valuable the hidden treasure, the more obstacles we’ll overcome to find it.

And, unfortunately, vice versa: the less valuable the treasure the less effort we’ll go to.

14. Consider something different

The problem here is that attention is impacted by prior experience.

If your last few emails were relatively uninteresting, recognition actually works against you. The recipient identifies your email and may then disregard it based on recent experience with those messages.

The two lessons here are obvious. First, try not to coast – sending emails of little value just for the sake of getting more emails out the door. You could be training people to ignore you.

However, coasting is almost inevitable. Not every email is perfectly targeted: we don’t always have a killer offer or killer content.

That’s why experts encourage segmentation, dynamic content and trigger emails as ways of avoiding the coasting problem.

But if you do have recipients who have become inactive or unresponsive, and recognition actually works against you, then try something different to grab their attention again.

Examples might be trying plain text email, a stand-out image, a humorous subject line etc.

OK, any more ideas for removing attention barriers? Bonus points for anyone who mentions…deliverability.

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• Channel: Email tactics