Interesting. In the last 10 minutes I’ve read two emails about “desire”.

One from Frank Kern, about “desire” being the way to get money whenver you want money.  That by tapping into people’s desire, they will buy things. Even when they probably shouldn’t. And the two types of desire – up-front desire versus seedling desire.

The next email was from Andy Jenkins, of Stompernet, about the need to stop selling, and create desire for your product.  About making your visitors “lust” after a fantasy result. Obviously there should be a real result from your product, but the desire comes from how the visitor fantasizes their life will change after buying your product.

Writing this post as I read my emails, I then find that Andy’s email was an affiliate link to Franks new video. No wonder they’re both about the same thing.

But that’s ok, because Andy’s email was personalised, and added value with a story of his own, about how a high traffic site failed at conversion, until he realised he had forgotten to tap into his visitors “desire”.

I opened Frank’s email because of curiosity. It was brief, and had a video link. And today (rarely) I was in the mood for videos.  Frank is a gifted and relaxed communicator, and I enjoyed his video.

Andy (sorry) is usually too verbose. But he eventually gets to a good point.

So creating desire is how to get people to buy. Even in a recession.

Yes we can.

Got an email from FootballAustralia today, to my hotmail account (I’m a soccer mum).

Opening the email, all I got was black and grey.

The email only had images above the fold, and as Hotmail blocks images by default, all I saw was a couple of blocks of colour. No image text alternatives, no text content at all.
Could they have done any worse?

In the first few seconds, they lost my attention.
The likelihood of paging down below the fold to find the text, disappeared.
Especially as this email means the end of Saturday morning sleep-ins, replaced by rushing around to ferry two boys to different early soccer matches.

But because I know them, and I was curious from a marketing point of view to see what they had to say, I unblocked the images and showed content. And yes then it was a very handsome email, with lovely images.

But with images blocked, and all the spam filters these days, the most effective email is a text-based email, with images as the garnish, rather than the main message carrier.

C.