Looking, but not reading

26th Oct 2009 A passion and truth by Guy

Photo by JasonRogersFooDogGiraffeBee

How many times have you heard the old saying, ‘hearing isn’t listening’? This highlights the truth that the act of receiving the message doesn’t mean you actually take conscious note of the content of the message itself.

These days with electronic messages filling up our inbox at an increasing rate, how many of us can honestly say we actually read the email message we have been sent? So don’t we have an equivalent case of ‘looking isn’t reading’?

In an unscientific straw poll I undertook of 10 SME business owners recently, all agreed that they looked at, dealt with and deleted most email messages now on their handheld devices, not their laptops, without opening them or, crucially, actually reading them properly.

This was mainly done as a swift ‘clean-up session’ of e-newsletters and emails from unknowns selling them something. In fact the only emails they said they actually read on a handheld tended to be simple text messages from known people. When they got back to their laptops later, these earlier e-shots were then either marked as already looked at or have been deleted – so there was rarely a second chance to consider or read them in their intended manner and visual format.

This set me thinking. We can spend hours creating visually great e-newsletters, but if read on a handheld mostly they do not even get read. In fact in most cases they can’t be read on a handheld - you have to scroll past lines and lines of garbled embedded html coding to find the ‘true text’. That is what makes you give up on them!

However if I get a professionally finished plain white envelope which has come from a business, addressed to me, at work or home, I open it. I have no idea who it is from – but I still open it, unfold it and have to read it for a few seconds to understand if it is then relevant or not. I can’t just look at the envelope and decide to bin it. It commands my attention for a few moments at least.

Think of your own email inbox, and contrast how you act to anonymous emails, compared with what you find in your postal inbox or on the doormat when you get home to anonymous envelopes?

An electronic device now allows us to create pre-screening of inbound non-personal messages, in many cases from the most cursory of reasons – time and impatience being uppermost. No such pre-screening takes place on a personally addressed letter in a plain envelope!

I believe that targeted, personalised, well written, and aptly timed posted unsolicited B2B communications can often get better cut-through and are actually read more than personalised unsolicited B2B emails.

From recent conversations with clients, well-targeted direct mail seems to be making a comeback, especially in B2B acquisition work, curiously thanks to the development of the handheld electronic device!

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Found in Direct