The Top Five Reasons

A drum roll, please. Here are the top five reasons for…using a top five list!Whether in your e-mail marketing or social media postings, top five (or six, eight or ten) lists make for fun reading and are a great way to convey concise bits of news. And here are my top five reasons that this concept works so well:

1.Customers know in advance that the post will not take long to read. Time is often more valuable than money to our shoppers, and so if we want to capture their attention we need to be quick. (I call this the Sesame Street method of communication — short bursts of information.)

2.The list format builds anticipation, and leads you on to the next item. In an article you might find that the reader loses interest after the first paragraph or two.

3.It’s a lot quicker to come up with short list items than to write longer, more explicative text.

4.There are endless topics that you could use for this format, such as Top Wedding Gifts of the Year,  or Top Reasons to Shop in _____, or Top Questions Asked about Our Products.

5.The selection of the top items often reflects the opinions of the person putting together the list, and we all like to know what other people are thinking. I love to see a vendor’s Top Sellers list, for example, to give me some guidance in deciding what to order.

If you’d like to do a take on the David Letterman concept, you could have do a count-down of Top Ten* items, with the #1 entry being the most humorous.  This would be a cute concept for a short video promoting your shop — you could even ask different customers to each read an item, and then read the last one yourself. Facebook postings and e-mail blasts with videos are most likely to attract attention and shares — and that’s the #1 reason to do promotions of any kind.

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder