There’s a saying in marketing: “Confused minds don’t buy.” We can apply this adage to our emails at work. “Confused minds don’t read our email.”

In marketing, when the marketer wants you to do something, they insert a “call to action.” In online marketing this is often a link or a button. Buy Now. Subscribe. Schedule a Call. Read More.

If the call to action is in the middle of a noisy page or surrounded by a lot of other information, it’s likely that the potential customer won’t see it or will ignore it because there’s just too much going on.

Confused minds don’t buy.

In a similar way, when we write detailed emails that contain a lot of questions we may think we’re doing the recipient and ourselves a favor. Everything is altogether in one email. Just read through and answer the questions.

For me what happens is I look at a busy email and think, “I’m going to need some time to pick through that.” The email might end up on my to-do list but not at the top. I go after quicker wins first where it’s clear what I need to do. And sometimes I run out of time to go back and look at the email that’s going to take a lot of effort to get through.

When I’ve sent detailed emails with lots of questions (or more than one at least), the replies I do get often only answer one question. Of course if I asked many questions I really need the answers to the others as well. Which results in a follow-up email, call, or IM.

Confused minds don’t read our emails.

So how do we make our emails such that people take action? I suggest we limit the number of questions we ask to one. In my experience, having one call to action in an email usually results in a reply with the answer you are looking for. If you must ask more than one question, make it easy to answer. Put all the questions together. Try not to overload the rest of the email with information.

Limiting choices for answers can also work. Instead of open-ended questions like, “what do you think about this?” you could ask, “on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being I don’t like it at all and 5 being I’m totally in favor of this, how much do you like this idea?”. Even if they answer with a rating, they may provide extra commentary to explain.

engineer your life

  • Pay attention to the emails you get. How do you react when one is long and detailed, and another is short and it is clear what you need to do?
  • See if you can make your emails that require action clear instead of adding a lot of content that may confuse the recipient.