Confirmation Bias: the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.
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I've been doing email marketing for ~8 years now.
I've learned my best subject lines aren't those that try to stand out or be different.
I've noticed the best engagement comes from writing something the person reading already agrees with.
In the strange but fascinating book Prometheus Rising, author Robert Anton Wilson describes the "hallway
test".
When giving university lectures, students would enter his auditorium walking through the same entrance hall.
When he'd ask students to describe that hall, none of them would be able to do so in the same way.
One might pick out the tiles, another the paint of the walls, another the clock by the door, some may note the people they saw, etc.
They were each paying attention to different things, because different things were already emphasised in their awareness.
He was trying to show how even something as simple as a hallway has enough detail to overwhelm us. So we need to have a way to know what is important, what is worth taking note of.
(Of course, the downside of this is that we really dislike finding out a model we've been using is incorrect).
We're all scanning the environment for things we either know or want to be true.
Instead of thinking how you can "cut through" in the inbox, think about how you can state (or negate) the concepts people are already scanning for.
—Matt
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