Earlier today I watched a friend of mine go through the mass of marketing spam she gets every day. “I wish I could make them stop sending me e-mails,” she said.

She hadn’t realized that she could unsubscribe from them by finding the tiny link at the bottom, so I showed her that.

Regardless, almost every single e-mail completely failed to engage her. Almost every e-mail fails to engage me too. Most e-mails are either a mess of non-displayed images, or a wall of text that someone in marketing thought I would care about rather than archive after a nanosecond.

I just archived an e-mail that said “The case for opendns deluxe.” It had a wall of text that presumably was going to try to upsell me. Immediate delete.

Here are three principles that would lead to higher e-mail engagement:

Start a conversation

Say one thing. Ask a question, state a problem, or say what’s changed. For example “Someone likes you on okCupid” or “you got a message on facebook” or “someone sent you $30 on paypal,” or “What’s your favorite color?”

If you are saying more than one thing, I will immediately archive you.

Require 2 seconds of commitment.

Once you’ve said your one thing, offer a link that looks like it will lead to two seconds of commitment. For example, “If I click this link I will be able to see who likes me” or “I will be able to see who wrote me” or “i will be able to get $30” or “I will answer this simple question”

Make that link fucking huge, and make it in html, so that nobody has to click “display images.” Ideally, people should have the sense that clicking that link will reveal something about their lives that they care about, but don’t know.

The formula is: “Something has happend that affects you! We’ll tell you what it is if you click this.” Create some mystery.

Gradually raise the commitment, as motivation becomes higher.

Once you’ve gotten a click, give them what they are looking for. Don’t open some page where you require a login. The link should log them in automatically. It should take literally .2seconds to load, and it should immediately look reasonable and non-spammy. If you force me to login, I’m just not going to. If you force me to provide more info, I’m not going to. There has to be immediate value.

For example, “Ok, now I have to rate 4 people to see who likes me” or “ok now I can read this message and I should really reply” (gamification, principle of reciprocity), or “if I answer this quick question about what color I like, I will be able to do something cool.”

Once you have that first level of commitment, you can gradually raise it by distracting people to do other things. For example, once okCupid has you rating matches, it’s kind of hard to stop. Once it’s clear that someone likes you, there is the sense that you should send them a message (although I never do). At this point, you can do more classic engagement things, like show other things someone might be interested in. Once you have crossed the 20 second barrier, you can start asking people to do things that might take 20 more seconds, or perhaps even a minute.

I wonder how long it will take everyone to realize this. It seems pretty simple to me. It’s funny that e-mail is already basically dead to everyone under 21. E-mail is actually much much easier to engage people w/ than fb messages, since fb basically sidelines you as they eat the entire internet.

Either way, engagement seems to be the principle that separates success from failure.