How to reverse the scarcity of attention problem your customer faces
Friends,
We are living in an age of abundance and scarcity. Abundance of information. Scarcity of attention.
Abundance of information leads to scarcity of attention which leads to abundance of information. It’s a vicious cycle.
What if we could break out of it though?
A baby step that we marketers can start to take tomorrow.
Today’s letter will talk about a cognitive bias known as attention ratio and how we can use it to help make our customers buy our product without bombarding them with information.
At it’s heart, attention ratio is about choice. But not through information abundance.
Rather, it’s through focus, awareness and attention.
This aproach is more systems focused rather than outcome focused.
Sure, our “ultimate object” might be to convert visitors into leads. but in this case, we are more concerned with the “how” and the systems we deploy to achieve the outcome.
The attention ratio says that:
Humans make decisions which are easy to follow.
The emphasis here is on the phrase “easy to follow”. At it’s heart, the phrase is systems-focused. The outcome will occur only when the process follows a certain system aka it is easy to follow.
The next question then becomes - How do we create a system that is easy to follow?
To answer that, let’s look at the elements that the system will NOT contain.
The system will not contain:
Distracting information.
Unnecessary information.
Incoherent Information.
But why did we choose to eliminate these elements?
Simple.
The human mind does not respond well to distractions. Too much information over-stimulates the brain. This leads to indecision.
As a result, your reader will feel fatigued. He will then do one of two things.
He will either (a) go with the default option to leave your website or he would (b) avoid making a decision altogether.
It’s a lose-lose for you and your customer.
So here’s what you do instead.
Follow the 1-1-1 rule on your landing page. 1 value prop, 1 clear message, 1 CTA.
Use images and videos that show your product.
Make your images point to the CTA.
Disable auto-play on videos or GIFs.
Once you do this and avoid the 3 points above, your reader will feel valued. He/she will feel calm, relaxed and will make better decisions.
More importantly, subconsciously, your reader will thank you for letting her focus her attention and awareness to what’s in front of her.