If your favorite show is interrupted so Bob can yell at you about his low low life-insurance prices, you’ll resent it. (Maybe you’ll just numbly endure, but we’ll call that “resentment” for now.)
If your favorite show is interrupted so the National Weather Service can alert you to a life-threatening situation hovering over your rooftop, you won’t resent it, you’ll appreciate it.
It wasn’t personal.
It wasn’t anticipated.
When the level of relevance reaches 100% personal and anticipated can drop to zero and the message will still be appreciated.
Relevance = Reaction
When a message is relevant, folks get out their wallets. By knowing your audience, your fans, and by refining your recruiting methods to attract fans, not just names on a list, you can increase the odds of this week’s message having something relevant for some, even most, of your readers. Quality content which is on topic as far as your fans are concerned has the greatest likelihood of feeling relevant when they receive it.
That’s the measure, by the way: how it feels to them. You don’t get to choose. You may be convinced this is exactly what they need right now, this book, this seminar, this idea.
The salesperson’s opinion is irrelevant, right?
But can you ever be sure that your mass message, your newsletter, is 100% relevant to any of your readers, let alone all your readers?
I think not.
Since you can’t foreknow relevance, meaning it may fall to 50%, 20%, even zero for any given newsletter on any given week, you have to build up the percentage of acceptance (that’s a unit of measure I just made up) with last week’s aspect, anticipation, and next week’s aspect, being personal.
Personal. Tune in next time to see how and why, like relevance, it can render the other two aspects moot.
And why, with personal it’s so different from relevant.
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