Journalists and editors have long known that the best way to engage readers with a news story is to follow the inverted pyramid model. Put simply, you start with the most compelling facts at the top, you then add relevant detail, and finally you provide the background information.
The same approach is followed by copywriters when drafting website and brochure content, and by public relations consultants when writing press releases.
It sounds like common sense, but it’s also quite counter intuitive if you’re more accustomed to sharing a story with friends where you build up a climax, rather than revealing everything upfront. It takes practice to get it right.
Campaign Monitor published a blog post earlier this year on how following an inverted pyramid approach is effective in email marketing, with some great examples of this in practice:
Research shows that an adult’s attention span is, on average, eight seconds.
With such a short attention span, you can’t assume people will actually read your campaigns word for word. Instead, it’s likely that they’ll quickly scan over them.
Because of this, it’s important to deliberately structure your campaigns so that they draw in these scanning readers and focus their attention on the key elements of your campaign.
The inverted pyramid model can help you do exactly that. It’s essentially a framework for structuring the elements of your email campaigns (headers, imagery, buttons, etc.) so that they work together to draw people in, deliver the key messages of your campaign and get them to click-through.
Read the full post here.
