You Have 8 Seconds to Impress Your Customer. What Do You Do?
A lot can happen in eight seconds. While it may seem that it’s not enough time for anything significant to happen, in reality a dozen of your prospective customers have fallen either in or out of love with your brand within this time. On average, the human attention span lasts 8 seconds – a goldfish’s lasts longer than 9 seconds! – and that is how long you have to get your brand in your customer’s mind.
Capturing and keeping an individual’s attention is not an easy job – of course, unless you know what you are doing. As you send out emails to current and prospective customers, your job becomes that much more difficult. You are virtually competing with hundreds of other emails the average person receives every day.
Getting subscribers to open your mail, read your content, and respond to it is no walk in the park. To get to your final goal, you have to apply four simple rules. These rules are simple to follow and are explained below.
Attention
Attract your readers with a catchy subject line and a visible sender address. The subject line will make subscribers notice your email, especially if it contains a familiar domain name. Either a brand or an individual name makes you look genuine. For example, if you buy business checks and envelopes from a professional provider, that sender name or subject line should mention the business in a visible manner. If you skip on these critical elements, subscribers are likely to ignore your email, or worse, trash it.
Interest
Now that your subscriber has noticed your email, the next step is getting them to read the content inside. Do this by telling a story. The story can be about how you have helped a customer solve his or her problems, or you could explain how features in your product work – in the end, people are always interested in stories.
Desire
The decision to purchase is most often tied to emotions. Strike a chord in your customer by offering a personalized experience. To do this, add some factual information in the emails and trigger some sense of urgency in the reader by offering more reasons why they should be buying and using your product.
Action
This step involves persuading the reader to make the next move by employing a clear call-to-action. You are now ready to rejoice, as the subscriber is in the final stages of the purchase cycle; however, if you do not guide them further, you are likely to lose a customer here. Simply add a Call-To-Action (CTA) and let him or her know what they should do next to proceed.
Creating the Perfect Email
Add some wit, create excitement and entice reader curiosity. In addition, add a direct and neat email preview text.
As you send out emails, segment your potential audience based on their interests and send them targeted emails. The emails you send out should address the reader’s ‘pain points,’ based on previous responses and interests you have identified after carrying out customer research. Ensure that the content in your email is engaging, relevant and timely.
Including educational content like e-books or how-to videos will pique the reader’s interest and push them to take action. However, do not flood emails with gifs or videos, and always avoid jarring blocks of content or images. In addition, aim to offer your reader helpful information as opposed to hard selling your products in every message.
