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Let’s say you are promoting a skin care line. Should you say your ingredients:

A. “Increase the skin cell cycle to reduce the appearance of fine lines “, or 

B. “Increase the skin cell cycle to increase the appearance of fullness”?

The difference is how directionally consistent your causal chains are, and as revealed in new research, this matters. What’s a causal chain? Let me explain.

Causal chains

Casual chains are statements where you say “doing x leads to y”. In business we often ...

To the passerby, all cows look the same. To the farmer, each is unique.

Your products are like this. 

You can see how each is special. How they are different from your competitors.

But to your customer, are they just looking at a field of cows?

Learn how to stand out through the science of influencing action.

Should you include a human in your social media post or will it turn your customers off?

Including humans in your social media photos is a great way to engage your audience. However, it can also mean they pay more attention to the people than your product. For that reason, researchers⁽¹⁾ wanted to work out whether there’s a middle ground, where human presence is implied rather than explicit.

I call it the “Goldilooks effect”.

Humans good, faces bad

Humans are wired to pay attention to...

Most of the letters and emails I receive are ‘safe’.

I was discussing this with a client the other day. 

Her communications specialist had drafted an email that was long winded, bureaucratic and entirely unengaging.

Lots of words, lots of waffle.

But being ‘safe’ is a risk.

Because you risk being ignored.

That’s fine if you want your message to be overlooked.

But if you want to engage? 

Be bold.

Learn how to write behaviourally effective emails and letters in my Just Do This progr...

Digital marketer Neil Patel shared stats on which length of email got the highest clicks. 

In his words, the “perfect length for email conversions”.

• The best length? 100-249 (>3.5% clicks)
• The worst? 500+ (<1%)

We can surmise that not saying much and forcing people to click through means more of them will.

Explaining yourself more fully reduces their interest in clicking.

Or does it?

Without knowing WHAT these emails communicated and WHAT the call-to-action was, these stats don’t r...

A software firm increased email open rates by 20% and sales leads by 31% and a financial services training company increased engagement by 10%. 

How?

If you were one of 400 senior marketers at Intuit Mailchimp’s From Here:To There conference, you already know the answer.

In one case it had to do with adding CEO to the sender’s address and in another, a first name to the subject line.

If you are curious about what else I covered, marketing news site B&T have just recapped highlights from m...

Are you making a simple formatting mistake that stops people clicking?

How you format a web link in your emails needs to change according to the relationship you have with the recipient.

If they know you, it’s fine to hyperlink.

If they don’t know you, don’t hyperlink.

For example, because you know me, I can hyperlink like this.

But when I am sending information to a new client, I instead provide the web URL address like this: www.briwillia

How you format a web link in your emails needs...

Baby birds open their beaks for two reasons. 

They trust their parent and it’s worth it. They get fed.

Customers and colleagues open your emails for the same reasons.

See: The Little Book of Letters and Emails

My word for the year is different.

Or to put it a better way, different is my word for the year.

It’s been remarkably clarifying.

From taking a different path when walking the dog to changing parts of my website and taking on different projects, reminding myself to be ‘different’ has been powerful.

It’s helped me unshackle from my status quo.

I’m even writing differently. Have you noticed?

Looser. More conversational.

And in the spirit of that, I’m going to experiment with how often I ...

Should you require people to provide an email so they can download a brochure from your website?

In this video behavioural expert Bri Williams shares the pros and cons for requiring an email from your customer, and how to do it well.

More about Just Do This: www.briwilliams.com/about-just-do-this