I received an e-mail after my last post.
“Can you make your emails shorter and easier to scan?”
That’s right. Make it shorter. Simplify. Dumb it down. Cut out explanations. Remove the metaphors. Ask people for less in the bewildering hope of getting more.
I could also use a how to headline and add bullet points.
It’s true, the longer the the posts, the higher the unsubscribes.
That last one was 0.6% – a new record!
Do you know what else is higher? Sales, useful feedback, behavior change…
Don’t worry about unsubscribes, they’re not the people you want to work with.
The short, snappy, posts get more visible engagement from the people you don’t want. They’re thrill-seekers with low attention spans.
Deeper Engagement Posts
The 1,000 – 10,000 word posts, that cover a small topic in a lot of depth, attract clients.
Every single one of our clients has come from doing valuable engagement work.
This means getting the referrals, hosting events, and creating detailed posts that others don’t have the knowledge, resources, or (more likely) the patience to create. This is the engagement work that attracts the people that do deep engagement work – the very people we love to work with.
The Cool Visible Engagement Crowd
There’s a cool crowd out there that want you to chase visible engagement deep into the noisy marketplace.
They want you to be in the entertainment business. They want you to spend your time doing silly, frivolous, stuff to drive engagement.
Please don’t play that game.
Go the other way. Go to the place your competitors can’t or won’t go. Go deeper than they can, write longer articles than they will, do more research than they can be motivated to undertake.
Aside:
Notice we put the link to advanced engagement methods at the bottom.
We would get many more clicks if we put it at the top.
So why at the bottom?
Because we don’t want people that click the first link they see. We don’t want curiousity seekers. It’s the people that get to the bottom we want to hear from.
