Are you harnessing this powerful curiosity-building technique in your emails?

👉 easy to use and makes a huge difference...

What makes you curious? To want to look into something more deeply?

It's an important question to answer because curiosity is what usually drives the first stage of marketing - sustaining someone's attention.

It's all well and good to get fleeting attention: a bold image on a Linkedin post, some emojis in your email subject line, a snappy elevator pitch when you're face to face.

But what really counts is whether you can deepen that initial spark of interest into more sustained attention. Someone actually caring about what you say or do.

Curiosity is the key to that.

There are lots of different theories of curiosity and what causes it. But a particularly useful one from a marketing perspective is from George Lowenstein whose (well-tested) concept is that curiosity is the gap between what you know and what you want to know.

You can trigger an information gap like this by offering a little piece of information, but not revealing it all. It's like a “cold open” on a TV show where you see the hero holding a smoking gun and being arrested, but you don't know what for or why and you have to watch the show to find out.

Or mentioning a powerful marketing technique that you're going to explain...but not in this email.

That's it for this week. I'll be going through the details of information gaps next week...

...only joking :)

Mentioning something and then not revealing it until later only works if you give something of value now. And if you don't make a big deal about the thing you're going to come back to.

I'll see if I can dig out some good examples of how this can be done subtly to share with you, but in this email I want to mention a curiosity technique I use a lot.

It's the use of demonstratives in your email subject line.

A demonstrative is a word like "this" or "these" or "that" or "those". 

Perhaps the most famous use of a demonstrative in marketing is "Do you make these mistakes in English?" - the headline of a newspaper ad that ran for decades and made millions for Sherwin Cody's language school.

The beauty of "do you make these mistakes in English?" is that it immediately prompts the question in your head "what mistakes?". And if you're a bit worried about your use of English you can't help but read the rest of the ad to find out what those mistakes are and whether you're making them.

Had the headline been "Do you make mistakes in English?" you'd have mentally answered "yes" or "no" and moved on.

But you can't answer the question "do you make these mistakes?" without reading on to find out what they are. It opens up an information gap that the target audience (the aspirational who are a bit worried about whether they're letting themselves down with their speech) can't resist reading on to close.

And that's the key really. Your target audience has to actually care about closing the information gap your demonstrative opens up.

"Do you make these career-ending leadership errors?" is irresistible to those climbing the greasy pole to senior leadership positions. It's of no interest to those of us who are happy to do our own thing in a solo business.

“Are you harnessing this powerful curiosity-building technique in your emails?” will hook you in if you want to succeed with emails and newsletters. It won’t if that’s not your thing.

Like all techniques, don't overuse it. I may have gone a bit mad and used it three emails running, so I'll lay off for a bit.

But done right, it's a great way to spark interest in what you're about to say.

- Ian