91–100 of 127 posts
Maybe if you made it a two word email and removed the signature it would get 16x the engagement. Or if you had an empty email and put the question in the subject you’d get 32x engagement. Attention spans these days are terrible.
This reminded me of Scott Adams' advice on writing too: https://www.scottadamssays.com/2015/08/22/the-day-you-became...
I've recently launched https://boxci.dev and have a 'leave your email if you have questions' box on the landing page. People have been leaving their emails, but surprisingly, even though the intent is very clear (I think), almost nobody has actually replied when I've emailed to open the conversation. The kinds of response rate percentages ( My opening email is nothing like as long as the first one in this article, bu…
Relevant for you: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/stop-asking-me-to-sign-up/
To get more responses to your surveys, make your surveys shorter. The massive response rate will make up for the loss in granularity; most of the granularity is not actionable anyway. The tricky thing is that some huge, in-depth survey looks better to your manager, whereas the simple one looks lazily developed.
I've noticed this too in emails to coworkers. If the email is long enough, they just skip it to "read it later". This is quite frustrating, because sometimes you just _have_ to communicate some more words.
When I took over, we decided what we thought was the best solution. Explained it in an email with max three lines and asked if we should continue with that solution. I usually got an OK within minutes.
And you are right, the long essays are put in the "read later" pile, and in our case, the customers just never got around to them.
Cut all the clutter, use simpler words, be personal. Do not write in a way that you do not talk.
For example, first few chapters of the book
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53343.On_Writing_Well
talk in details on the topic.
Now that everybody's remote, I think there's an important conversation about respecting the reader's time that needs to happen. 1) Brevity. 2) Get your terminology perfect . Asynchronous "who's on first" sucks . 3) When discussing anything on the web, start with a hyperlink. I can't see your screen, I can't scroll or inspect your screenshots. Expecting the reader to hunt down the resource that you had one ctrl-C, ctr…
What does that mean? "On first"?
The shorter the email the more believable it becomes that it was specifically written by a human directed at you, not a mass-used template. If you feel like you get an automatic email, you're not going to respond, because you don't want to talk to a computer. If, on the other hand, you can suspend your disbelief and entertain the fiction that someone named "Valerie" at E-Corp personally contacted you, you are infinit…
For me it isn't about not wanting to speak to a computer, I simply don't want to read a bunch of marketing copy. If a computer sent a short and direct to the point message I would be much more willing to read and respond to them.
A corollary is that if you do have to write a long email, try to start it off with a short, 1-2 sentence intro paragraph that piques interest and pulls people in to the rest of the text. Even better, try to keep all the paragraphs as short as possible. Each paragraph has two jobs: to convey some information, and to convince the reader to keep going to the next paragraph. Done right, you can get someone to read a long…
Also, they're top-loaded with all the essential info, followed by a long tail of lesser details as the article progresses (this tail can be cut short in case of space constraints).
Now that everybody's remote, I think there's an important conversation about respecting the reader's time that needs to happen. 1) Brevity. 2) Get your terminology perfect . Asynchronous "who's on first" sucks . 3) When discussing anything on the web, start with a hyperlink. I can't see your screen, I can't scroll or inspect your screenshots. Expecting the reader to hunt down the resource that you had one ctrl-C, ctr…
> Asynchronous "who's on first" What does that mean? "On first"?