When you communicate with people online—especially by email—you need to stand out and look remarkable.
Why is this so important?
We are living in the age of social media, and attention is now the ultimate currency. If you can’t capture attention, you’ve got no shot at success.
And this means you need to know how to use the tricks that will help you steal as much attention as possible:
Trick #1: Automatic Appeal
Most people don’t know this, but it’s an incredible hack.
When people look at things—architecture, flowers, other people, even words on a page—they make automatic assessments about what they’re seeing.
When we see proportion and symmetry, we pay closer attention. But this is a potent attention hack because we don’t consciously choose to pay attention; it’s just our natural response to seeing meaningful proportional order.
Because of this, you need to make sure your communications include the right ingredients to trigger people’s automatic attention mechanisms.
Using Golden Ratio Typography is the easiest way to achieve this.
When your content is dressed up in golden proportions, it will have a primal appeal that people cannot resist.
Trick #2: Use Color to Indicate Importance
This trick is so simple, but it’s annoyingly difficult to achieve in our modern communications channels.
For example, Gmail provides extremely limited formatting options. It’s tough to craft an email that stands out visually, and you can’t use the most attention-grabbing elements like Callouts (such as the blue box above) or Buttons.
Same thing with social media. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and X all have extremely limited formatting options (even worse than Gmail).
But it’s easy to see how effective color can be when you use Callouts within your content. Messages like this become impossible to miss!
Scroll back up this email and notice how I’ve used colorful Highlights and Callouts to create visual excitement.
And now consider this: What if I told you there was a tool you can use to break through Gmail’s formatting constraints to create emails that use all these attention-grabbing tricks? 🤔
Trick #3: Keep Your Reader Moving with Contextual Bolding
This trick is one of my favorites because you can use it anywhere. (You don’t even need a special tool.)
I call it contextual bolding, and it’s simply the process of making key words and phrases bold at various points in your content.
This works as an attention hack becuase it serves two critical purposes:
- People “read” in two modes—scanning and reading. Elements like headings and bold text stand out during the scanning process, but they also keep people who are already reading anchored to your content.
- Attention is a fickle thing, and people get numb very quickly. When you use contextual bolding, you are constantly reminding the reader, “Hey, pay attention! This is the important stuff you need to know.” It shocks them back into engagement and keeps them focused.
If you’re still reading, congratulations—you’ve just proven how well these tricks work to capture and hold attention 😁
And now I’ve got great news for you:
You can start using these attention tricks today in all your emails.
That’s right—GRT for Email works for every type of email, including those you send from your regular inbox (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc).
This means you can use Callouts, Highlights, and even Buttons like the irresistible one below in all your emails.
Are you ready to get started? Click this button to see GRT for Email: