No Thank You to Using the Ziegarnik Effect to Keep ‘Em Reading

We worry about things in which we have not achieved closure, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik realized back in 1927.  When writing content for a business blog, Hassan ud-Deen of unbounce.com concludes, you can use that Zeigarnik insight to “seduce your prospect”. You start the blog post with a hypnotic sentence, he says, snagging readers’ attention and “dragging” them into your copy, talking of a “mysterious little secret”. You keep dangling this secret “open loop” throughout the post, stoking their curiosity, using short sentences that go heavy on the “power verbs”, light on the adjectives. The right action words, Ud-Deen says,” give your copy a muscular, grab-you-by-the-throat effect that keeps your reader glued to the screen.”

To demonstrate one form of  the Ziegarnik effect magic, psychologists Davis and Knoles tested a technique known as reframing.  Going door to door to sell note cards for charity, they used two different “pitches”.  In Pitch #1, prospects were told the price was $3 for 8 notecards.  40% of the households approached completed a purchase. In Pitch #2, prospects were told the price was 300 pennies for 8 notecards;80% of the households became buyers.

What had happened?  The prospects’ routine thought processes were disrupted and they were distracted, Told that the 8 cards for 300 cents was a bargain, they kept trying to “close the open  loop” by figuring it out, remaining engaged in the buying process. What Hassan ud-Deen is inviting blog copy writers to do is “crank up” that confusion factor power to increase conversions.

Uncomfortable reading about all these “tricks??  I know I was, particularly in light of the fact that so many of our Say It For You clients are professional practitioners. . “You can use hard sales tactics when you’re doing door-to-door sales or sending sales letters, but you can’t use the same method for social media,” asserts Heather Sawtell of multibrain.net.  Writing in the Daily Egg, Neil Patel says ,“A successful blogging initiative has to provide valuable information and eye-catching visual content without coming off as pushy and sales-ey” Sawtell and Patel are much more in tune with my preferred methods of creating blog content..

What I like to call the “I/you conversational style” is precisely the approach most effective for business blogs. As a corporate blogging trainer, I use the word “selling” in a very specialized sense.  That’s because, in today’s world, whatever your business or profession, there’s almost no end to the information available to consumers on the Internet.  Our job then, as business blog content writers, isn’t really to “sell” anything, but rather to help readers absorb, buy into, and use all that information. Thank you, but I don’t believe I’ll have much need for  Ziegarnick today!