Slick tyres, less friction

I bought some slick tyres for my mountain bike, replacing the knobbly ones.

Now I'm gunning around 20% faster, swerving traffic cones, bunny-hopping onto pavements, going through red lights, making myself a nuisance.

OK, that’s me getting carried away. I’m actually a very polite cyclist and I don’t bust lights or annoy drivers, but I do the other things.

Being currently carless, whizzing around on 2 wheels takes me back to fun times as a teenager, and those tyres satisfyingly help me beat the snarly traffic even more niftily.

Thinner, smoother tyres have less contact with the tarmac, reducing rolling resistance or friction, so the same amount of energy converts to more speed.

Thinking about this reminded me of all the newsletter friction that can slow a reader down or worse, that most emailers never seem to think about.

Sometimes there are so many options that readers don’t just get held up, but take wrong turns, go down one-way streets and veer off into blind alleys.

Not what you want having spent all that time and money acquiring their attention.

The trick is to think hard about your objective before you go cramming your email full of stories, sub-headings, emojis, pictures, graphics and links, and so on.

They all are potential attention sucks, danger areas where you can give up a reader in a nano-sec.

Obviously, there's a right and a wrong place for everything.

My leisure and events newsletter usually has many pictures, emojis and up to 50 links, all very distracting and frictiony.

But that’s OK because it’s a curated bag of goodies and I’m trying to learn about audience preferences.

This email, by contrast, is not selling anything, trying to get you to click somewhere, persuade you to give feedback, but if I was I still have your attention right now, more than 300 words in.

All I want you to do today, and most days, is to read to the end.

Then, when I know you might be interested, I might ask you to buy something.

Some emails need their slick tyres on.

Less friction = more attention = more sales.