A few weeks ago, I was giving a US-based founder some advice about an outbound email programme he was planning. We were talking about what his emails needed to say when I told him: “Your mission is to help them make a decision.”
Not convince them. Not sell to them. Help them make a decision. Because we spend an enormous amount of time thinking about what we want customers to do after receiving an email.
Buy this. Book this. Register for this. Upgrade to this. But how often do we stop and think about what the customer needs to know before they can comfortably make that decision?
Those aren’t quite the same thing. And the difference between them may explain why some customers who are perfectly interested in what we’re offering still don’t act.
We optimise for persuasion. Customers are trying to make decisions.
The founder I was speaking with had developed a tool that helps real estate agents create and edit social video. He wanted people to try it for free.
On the surface, that’s a pretty easy proposition to communicate. Explain what the product does, demonstrate the benefit, tell them it’s free and give them a link.
Job done. Except it isn’t. Because I immediately started thinking about what I would want to know if I were the person receiving that email:
- How much effort will it take me to try this?
- Will I need to upload my content somewhere?
- How long will it take to set up?
- Why is it free?
- What happens after the beta?
- What happens to the work I’ve put into it if the company doesn’t continue?
- Is trying this actually going to save me time, or am I about to invest an hour discovering it doesn’t work for me?
Those questions don’t necessarily need to appear in the email as a giant FAQ. But the uncertainties behind them need to be addressed.
Because “free” removes the financial cost. It doesn’t remove the decision cost.
The questions customers don’t ask
This is where I think marketers can make a dangerous assumption. If customers have questions, they’ll ask us.
Except they often won’t.
Think about your own behaviour. When you’re considering buying something online and can’t quite work out whether it’s right for you, how often do you contact the company and ask?
Sometimes. But quite often you simply don’t buy.
You might look elsewhere. You might decide it’s too much effort. Or you might tell yourself you’ll come back later. And we all know how many of those I’ll come back later decisions actually result in us coming back later.
From the marketer’s perspective, nothing obvious has happened. The customer hasn’t complained. They haven’t submitted a question. They haven’t told us the offer was unclear.
They’ve simply disappeared. That’s why the questions your customers don’t ask may be the ones costing you the conversion.
Every unanswered question adds decision friction
We often talk about friction in terms of the mechanics of conversion.
How many fields are on the form? How many clicks does checkout require? Is the website fast? Does the CTA stand out?
All important. But there’s another kind of friction that’s harder to see: cognitive friction.
Every time someone has to stop and work something out, we’re asking them to expend mental effort.
Will this work with what I already have? What’s the difference between these options? Can I return it? What happens after the trial? Which plan do I need? Is this suitable for someone like me?
The more work required to answer those questions, the harder we’re making the decision. And sometimes the customer simply doesn’t care enough to do the work.
That’s not necessarily a failure of persuasion. It’s a failure to make the decision easy enough.
The sender knows too much
I was reminded of this again recently while putting together a recommendation for a client. I was proposing a new approach to warming up their email infrastructure before they began sending campaigns from it.
I knew why I was recommending it. I knew how the warm-up platform worked. I understood what we’d do first, what would happen afterwards, what we’d monitor, what the risks were and why I was recommending a particular level of investment.
So it would have been very easy to present the recommendation and the price. Except my client didn’t know everything I knew.
At one point, I realised I’d started talking about the warm-up platform and what we would do with it before properly explaining what it actually was and how it worked. It made complete sense to me.
But I wasn’t the person who needed to make the decision. And that’s a trap marketers fall into constantly.
We know the product. We know the offer. We know what happens after somebody clicks. We know why one option costs more. We know what the terminology means. We know what happens next.
Because we know those things, it’s surprisingly easy to forget that the customer doesn’t. That creates a knowledge gap between sender and recipient.
And somewhere inside that gap can be the piece of information the customer needs before they’re prepared to act.
Familiarity makes the knowledge gap worse
The longer you work with a product, the harder this becomes. Something that feels obvious to the marketing team may be completely new to the customer.
We see this particularly with complex products and services, but ecommerce isn’t immune.
A product page assumes you understand the difference between two models. An email promotes a loyalty benefit without explaining how to redeem it. A retailer announces a new product using terminology that means everything internally and very little to someone encountering it for the first time. An email promotes a discount but leaves you wondering whether it applies to the item you actually want.
None of these are necessarily big problems. That’s precisely why they’re dangerous. They’re small moments of uncertainty. And every small moment asks the customer to do a little more thinking.
More information isn’t necessarily the answer
There’s an obvious danger here. If unanswered questions create friction, should we simply answer everything?
Absolutely not.
When I was talking to the founder, I made the opposite point too. We didn’t want to replace a short outbound email with an A4 page containing every conceivable detail about the product, company, beta programme and founder.
Because now we’ve created another problem. We’ve increased the cognitive load.
Too little information creates uncertainty. Too much information creates effort.
The goal isn’t to give customers all the information. It’s to give them the right information for the decision they’re being asked to make.
Start with the decision, not the email
This changes the way we approach email copy. Instead of starting with what we want to say, start with the decision.
Ask: What decision are we asking this person to make?
Then work backwards:
- What do they need to understand?
- What might make them hesitate?
- What assumptions are we making?
- What feels obvious to us because we already know it?
- What questions might occur to them that they probably won’t bother asking?
- What information would reduce uncertainty?
- And what can we safely leave out?
Now we’re not simply writing an email. We’re designing a decision.
This isn’t just about overcoming objections
Traditional sales thinking might frame all of this as “handling objections”. And sometimes it is. But I think that’s too narrow.
An objection implies that the customer has formed a reason not to act and we need to overcome it. Decision friction can happen much earlier.
The customer might not be thinking: “I object to this because…”
They may simply be thinking: “Hmm. I’m not sure.”
That uncertainty matters. We don’t approach every decision with unlimited attention, motivation and cognitive capacity. We skim. We use shortcuts. We defer decisions. We choose the easier option.
And when making a decision starts requiring more effort than the perceived reward justifies, doing nothing becomes very attractive.
That’s why making the decision easier can sometimes be more effective than making the sales argument stronger.
Use AI to find the gaps before you use it to write
There’s an interesting role for AI here too. Instead of immediately asking AI to write the email, use it earlier in the process.
Give it the audience, offer, product, context and the decision we’re asking someone to make. Then ask it to identify:
- the questions someone might have,
- where they might hesitate,
- information that could be missing,
- assumptions we’re making about what they already understand,
- perceived risks,
- and what they might need to feel confident taking the next step.
That can be incredibly useful. But, as ever, AI shouldn’t replace the marketer’s judgement.
It doesn’t know your customer simply because you’ve told it to “act like” one. Its job is to help surface possibilities. Our job is to decide which ones matter.
Look at your next email differently
Before you send your next campaign, automation or sales email, try something. Read it from the recipient’s side rather than the sender’s.
Forget what you know. Forget the meeting where the offer was discussed. Forget the product briefing. Forget the strategy document. Forget that you’ve seen this campaign twelve times already.
Then ask: What do I know that my customer doesn’t — but needs to know in order to make this decision?
You may discover that the missing ingredient isn’t another benefit. It isn’t more urgency. It isn’t a stronger CTA. And it certainly isn’t another exclamation mark.
It might simply be the answer to a question your customer was never going to ask you.
Because your email’s job isn’t just to persuade somebody to act. It’s to make the decision easier to make.
