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Key Takeaways
- Businesses can’t assume people will read important information. Crucial details need to be made highly visible and communicated repeatedly across channels.
- Use short paragraphs, prominent headlines, visual cues, repetition and verbal explanations to accommodate shorter attention spans and increasingly distracted readers.
- Track what prospects repeatedly ask and A/B test messaging to improve how effectively information gets through.
“How much is the Strategy Session?”
“It’s $2,950.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that. It’s the first I’m hearing of it.”
It takes everything in us not to respond. It was in the email you received, in big orange letters, when you first reached out to us. And we discussed it during the Complimentary Consultation, when we explained exactly what the Strategy Session entails and what it costs.
At Ivy Coach, a leading college consultancy, we’ve been in business for three and a half decades. Increasingly, we’ve noticed something we never expected to become a business problem. Our prospective clients don’t read. And we’re not talking about the Privacy Policy or Terms & Conditions. We’re talking about the big stuff, the stuff practically waving at them.
These aren’t distracted teenagers, either. They’re their parents, highly educated adults who are perfectly capable of reading several paragraphs but increasingly seem unwilling to do so.
That raises an interesting question for any business. How do you communicate information that prospective clients genuinely need to know when people increasingly don’t consume the information you send them?
At Ivy Coach, we’ve adapted. Here are five things we now do.
1. Sandwich it
Tell them the fee. Explain the service. Tell them the fee again.
This is hardly revolutionary. Social psychologists have long studied the primacy and recency effects. People tend to remember what they encounter first and last and forget that which is sandwiched in the middle. So if something is important, we bookend it. Fee. Explanation. Fee.
Is it repetitive? Absolutely. Is it effective? More effective than assuming someone will remember something they may not have read in the first place.
2. Repeat yourself
Once upon a time, saying something once was sufficient. Then came email, where we could send a reminder. Now we send the reminder about the reminder.
A prospective client might receive the information in an email, hear it from a member of our team, see it on our website and then receive it again before making a decision. This can feel absurd. But the alternative is discovering after the fact that the prospective client genuinely never saw it.
3. Make important information impossible to miss
We used to believe that good information architecture meant making information easy to find. Now we believe that critical information should be difficult not to find.
That means larger type, shorter paragraphs, headlines and visual cues. We’re designing communications for scanning rather than reading. The goal isn’t to dumb down the information. Rather, it’s to make sure the information survives contact with an increasingly distracted reader.
4. Say it out loud
If reading is becoming optional, businesses have to communicate through other channels.
When prospective clients schedule Complimentary Consultations with us, after receiving a detailed email outlining our services, we no longer assume they’ve read anything.
There is something almost comically inefficient about explaining something verbally that was already explained perfectly well in writing. But if the written explanation wasn’t consumed, efficiency becomes irrelevant. The medium matters less than whether the message gets through.
5. A/B test it
If prospective clients aren’t reading, we need to know exactly what they are seeing. So we keep track. Literally.
When a prospective client asks, “How much is the Strategy Session?” we write it down. If enough people ask the same question, we know our messaging isn’t doing its job. We then test different ways of presenting the information and see what changes. Bigger type, different placement, even more repetition, different wording.
It’s a simple form of A/B testing, except our conversion metric is sometimes whether someone asks a question that was answered three or four times already. The point isn’t to blame the prospective client for not reading. Instead, it’s to recognize that if people consistently miss something, the responsibility is on us to communicate it even better. Well, unless we’ve answered it four times. At that point, we’ll consider sending the answer by carrier pigeon.
Did you even read this?
None of this is particularly complicated. In fact, it’s almost embarrassingly obvious. But it reflects a larger shift taking place across businesses. Communication is no longer simply about transmitting information. It’s about getting information through.
We live in an age of infinite information and diminishing attention. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is also sitting between people and the information itself, summarizing, filtering and answering questions before someone ever reaches the underlying source.
Businesses therefore have to rethink an assumption that has stood for centuries: If you provide people with important information, they will read it.
Or maybe they won’t. Which brings us to the obvious test of whether you actually read this editorial.
How much is Ivy Coach’s $2,950 Strategy Session, which is $2,950? If you have to scroll back up to check, don’t worry. You’re our target demographic.
Key Takeaways
- Businesses can’t assume people will read important information. Crucial details need to be made highly visible and communicated repeatedly across channels.
- Use short paragraphs, prominent headlines, visual cues, repetition and verbal explanations to accommodate shorter attention spans and increasingly distracted readers.
- Track what prospects repeatedly ask and A/B test messaging to improve how effectively information gets through.
“How much is the Strategy Session?”
“It’s $2,950.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that. It’s the first I’m hearing of it.”
