Award Winning Blog - Agitator

What Time is It?

Faces matter. Humans know this, intuitively. Babies process and understand faces at an almost adult level as early as four months. We automatically process expressions taking cues and altering our behaviors accordingly. And of course we see faces all the time. This almost constant exposure to faces makes us prefer inanimate objects that mimic faces. […]

Learn More May 16, 2022

Could Your Storytelling Use Some Help?

A story well told lights up the same parts of the brain as if we experienced it directly. That’s powerful. But telling me to use stories and showing lots of examples is like expecting me to pick up a foreign language by watching a foreign language movie. I need a lot more specific instruction and […]

Learn More May 13, 2022

Does Your Copy Feel Personal and Readable?

NextAfter has run and published more email test results than you can shake a stick at. What have they learned? More conversational and natural copy wins. A water is wet finding? Maybe, but there is a big difference between believing this or knowing it and having copy that does it well. Our sample […]

Learn More May 11, 2022

We Don’t Write So Good. And How to Easily Fix It

This is the cover page of the co-branded, jointly produced report on the state of email copy from NextAfter and DonorVoice. In this case, you can judge the book by its cover. It’s a large email sample and the report is visually appealing, easy to read and easy to find nuggets of goodness. One of […]

Learn More May 9, 2022

Is BLM Protester the Same as Covid Anti-Lockdown Protester?

Comparing BLM protesters to Anti-Lockdown protesters probably seems like comparing pagans and Christians or saying left is right and up is down. It’s far more common for those on the political right to characterize BLM as Antifa fascists promoting violence and those on the left describing Anti-Lockdown as ignorant, gun toting racists promoting violence. Violence […]

Learn More May 6, 2022

Ask Amounts: $.99 and Upgrading

We wrote last week about the allure of $.99 pricing in the consumer world and argued for testing with $.99’s in the ask string. The best test is appending education to your file (cheap, quick and easy) as proxy for numeracy, and having a split test since more numerate and less numerate people process prices […]

Learn More May 4, 2022