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You've tried all kinds of configurations and formats, but your email communications still aren't generating the leads and activity levels you'd like to see. Well, guess what? Brief, bold and germane are three factors that play to generating initial attention. What's your goal? Chances are, it's to get your audience to click to learn more. Trying to do anything more than that in an email message is overkill. Why? Because your audience loses focus.
There are tons of articles about limited attention and information overflow. For some reason, that seems to have spawned the idea that you need to justify-extensively-why your audience should actually take the action you want them to.
Have you considered that you're trying too hard? That perhaps your focus is still so clearly about your company and products that you've lost sight of what's important to your audience. It's kind of like celebrating that your company comes in at number 1 in the search results for a keyword-only none of your potential customers search for that term/phrase.
Let's take a look at the three factors to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.
Brief: Get to the point and do it quickly. Your prospects have no time to waste and no patience for digging through a bunch of stuff to find the point themselves. In fact, they won't. This factor is all about conciseness and word selection. Believe it, or not, it's harder to write brief messaging than it is to write longer copy. Every word needs to count.
Bold: Give them something outside their normal thinking. Don't make it up, but consider your subject matter and put a twist in how you approach it. Give them an unexpected statistic or impact that may change their evaluation of the problem or challenge at hand.
Germane: Just another way of saying relevance. Whatever you're telling them needs to be associated with something top of mind that your audience must deal with. If the subject is not on their current To Do list, you've misread your audience.
Put all three together and you'll have an email message that drives action. Just remember to focus on the audience's perspective. They don't care one whit about your company or products. They care about knocking that growing list of priorities down. And they care about doing it the best way they can.
Here's an example:
Ex 1: Our company is the leading provider of technology solutions for customer loyalty. We can help you connect with your customers and keep them engaged throughout their lifecycle with your company. Our fifth generation software has been tried and tested by thousands of customers who've reaped better customer relationships over the last 12 years. Blah, blah, blah...
Ex 2: You're charged with reducing customer churn. Our expertise enables you to not only reduce it, but to reverse the trend. Click here for ideas on how you can begin increasing your customers' satisfaction today.
Example 1 is focused on the company. Example 2 is focused on the customer and offers a bold statement about not only stopping, but reversing, customer churn. Then it invites the reader to get some ideas about how they make that happen. And it indicates the change can begin immediately.
Brief, Bold and Germane. All in 3 sentences. All of them focused on something critically important to the audience, given their responsibility for a strategic priority that delivers business results.
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