In email marketing, it is important to draw the attention of the reader to read your message as detailed as possible. But we know only too well that we have to share this attention with other email marketers.
Therefore, we have to keep in mind that sometimes we have only a few fractions of seconds to draw the attention of the reader. Your reader will take a glimpse at your e-mail to see if he or she didn’t miss anything. We can only welcome the FOMO principle, the Fear Of Missing Out. That glimpse we have to serve in the best possible way and once again we can call upon human reflexes.
Dropped out characters
Our eyes are immediately drawn to important key points. The rest we fill – or at least our brains – naturally in. You’ve already seen texts passing by on social media where the vowels were omitted, but we’re perfectly understandable in the meantime. Or proverbs where the keyword was missing and we still knew exactly what it was. Well, this is where the principle of ‘key words’ come into play.
Recognition
In e-mail marketing – especially if it’s about longer messages – it is very important to work with subheadings. On the one hand those headings are used as ‘racks to hang on’ different paragraphs.
Reading on screen is different than on paper. If the reader – actually his eye – has lost its thread, these are ideal landmarks to restart the reading.
Content
But there’s more. A reader who is in a hurry will quickly read the subheadings. Therefore, you should take care that you not only have a physical ‘rack’, but also the right content. This way the reader can fill them in himself and understand the essence of the message, without fully reading the text. Or perhaps this can be a trigger to read the entire text.
An eraser did the job
Today we have an example from the B2B world. It is about a new version of software. Ask any developer and he will tell you that there are daily messages like this in his inbox. The previous principles apply here as well. We erased the text in Photoshop, leaving nothing but the ‘key words’.
Take the acid test
That’s the first figure you’ve got in mind. Go through it, read the remaining ‘key words’. Do you have an idea about the message they wanted to convey? Well, we have put the original message in this blog post as well as some sort of ‘cast out nines test’. Take a moment now to read the entire message. And compare this with your first idea, did you read something substantially different?
Key worf policy
So perhaps we should adjust our way of writing emails a little bit. You should first determine what message you want to convey. First you can make a list of what the key content elements are, then convert them into perfect subheadings and then you can start with writing the paragraphs. It is certainly worth trying. We would only change one thing, which is the font….
