• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, May 5, 2017

Finally — a surefire way to engage consumers. Leanplum has analyzed 2.6 billion push notifications, and issued a study of the most popular words.

But they gotta be kidding. Why bother with this when another study by Prezi shows that 80% of all consumers forget most of what they read after three days, and that half can’t recall even one iota of it? 

It makes you wonder why CEOs waste money on content, and why writers and artists choose this as a vocation. So let’s try to resolve this in the hope that we can all hang onto our jobs for awhile: Which report is right? Maybe they both are.

The Prezi study was conducted withcognitive neuroscientist Dr. Carmen Simon, and is part of an effort to understand the human mind and how it relates to marketing. The team found, among other things, that only 7% of those polled read more than five full articles in a day. (Those that read more clearly are part of an elite group. But can they remember the articles?) 

People forget content for these reasons, Netimperative reports:

• Irrelevancy (55%);
• A lack of motivation to remember it (36%);
• The fact that there is too much content to retain (30%).

Don’t comfort yourself that there are other reasons. “Surprisingly, distractions (18%) and stress (9%) were far less significant factors, meaning that the primary reasons for forgetting relate to the content itself, rather than external factors,” Netimperative continues, describing the survey results.

This makes sense, but it’s depressing. What to do?

Prezzi finds that Millennials desire a two-way conversation, either online or in person — and when they get it, 70% are more likely to buy. So reach out to them.

Another solution is to create more memorable content — if you can.  

“Content which ‘tells the audience something new’ was the most memorable, helping 27 per cent of respondents to remember a brand, followed by content which teaches, inspires, or entertains (each 25%),”  the survey said.

Here are a couple of other findings from Prezi. We quote from Netimperative:  

• 49% of the respondents recall content that mentions “something good that’s happened.” (Hey, remember that discount we gave you?)
• 37% find video memorable, followed by written articles (28%) and face-to-face presentations (21%). That last one is the hardest to fathom. (Uh, what was the age demographic for this study?)
• 50% switch off within the first twelve minutes of a one-hour, slide-based presentation.

And of course, there is the main finding, put so eloquently by Netimperative: that “80% of consumers forget the majority of information from branded content after only three days, and over half can’t recall a single detail.”

Now let’s return to the Leanplumsurvey and see if this compendium of engagement devices can help us. It reports that gifts and prizes are common incentives, and that marketers use words like enter, win, bonus, reward “collect,” “chance” and “tournament” to grab attention.

And many marketers get personal with words like you, your, us, our and we.

Terms of polite discourse — i.e., marketers are really polite. Please, thanks, hi, hello, and welcome are all among the top 50 most-used words. Are also popular.

Beyond that, here are some things that you should try to convey in your content:

Urgency

Alert, breaking, cancellation, critical, date, deadline, delay, immediately, imminent, important, instantly, notice, pending, quickly, reminder, reveal, speedy, tick-tock, timely, today, wait

Exclusivity

Accepted, activate, application, deliver, drawing, eligible, inquire, inventory, invitation, limited, member, official, opportunity, pass, queue, reward, spotlight, you’ve

Emotion

Believe, dream, epic, escape, imagine, improve, indulge, love, miracle, playtime, reward, unplug, wish, woo

(Warning: Don’t use words that convey negative emotions, like addiction, avoid, creepy, forfeiture, quit, etc.).

Value

Bargains, buy, cash, check, deals, money, offers, payday, sale, sell.

Granted, it’s easy to be cynical about this: How you can stand out if everyone is using the same terms? And don’t some of these words resemble clickbait? Finally, they're concerned more with offers than content. But marketing is content, isn't it? 

But they work. And remember the direct marketing basics: Unless you’re sending emails only for branding purposes, in which case consumers had better remember you, the key thing is whether they buy. If they do, it’s not so important that they remember everything you said, or who wore what in a video.  

Meanwhile, thanks for reading this through to the end. Now we’re going to test you.