Gone in Fifty Seconds: Marketing to the ADD Consumer
“We can make your email better.” No, really. I can just picture the reader rolling their eyes as they immediately hit delete. It is incredibly hard to write an email selling a product and not have it sound like spam (of course maybe an email selling something is by definition spam, but I’d like to think not).
What if you could make people’s work easier, but you need give five minutes of their time to do it? The answer, it seems, is that you don’t. Logitech did a study that found that users typically have six applications open in their computer at any given time, and generally will only stick in one window for 50 seconds. Not that this should be surprising to any of us, as I write this I have more than the average six applications open and I’m beginning to think my four-year-old nephew has a better attention span than I as I flit between them. Actually, I’m lucky if you’re even still reading this.
So here’s the rub. My job this summer is to try to sell Email Center Pro, which is actually (not that I’m biased), a great product. Seriously, it solves a lot of small business email woes (again I picture the rolling of the eyes, but maybe I’m being overly sensitive). The problem is I can’t explain it well to anyone in less than fifty seconds. Does it make the product unsellable? Can we only sell products that fit our short attention span culture? I’d like to think not, but it certainly is giving me lots of trouble. Hard enough trying to sell a product by catchphrase, but this one doesn’t reduce well to a simple slogan (or maybe we just haven’t thought of it yet).
Are there other products out there that could solve some of our problems, but we just can’t be bothered to take the five minutes to hear about them?
If you’ve got a suggestion, I’d love to hear it. But only if I can read it in fifty seconds 
