Have you ever eaten just a little too much dinner? Okay, let’s say you ate way too much dinner. You know how you feel sluggish, tired, lethargic…and just useless? And you think to yourself, “I will never eat again!” Keep that feeling in mind when creating content for your customers. You don’t want to overfeed them!
Overfeeding your customer means you’re giving them too much information at once, or just way too often. I’m sure you have heard of the phrase “information overload”. While your brain may not explode, it may feel like it just can’t take in any more information – and that just leaves you with that glazed look like you have when you eat one more piece of pie than you should have.
I know that many people feel it’s necessary to provide as much information as possible, perhaps in a very long video, or in a very densely typed ebook. However, useful bites and chunks of information are more easily remembered. You can divide up your product into easily digestible sections, levels, volumes – or even multiple products – to prevent overfeeding your customers!
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I can’t believe the uncanny timing of your post, Gwen. I just finished reading the LONGEST sales letter in history! I won’t mention the business owner’s name (that wouldn’t be polite). But I will mention that it was ridiculously lengthy. I kept thinking to myself … who would actually WANT this much information all at once?! No joke, it was much longer than some e-books I’ve read.
I love your analogy. Overeating is never a comfortable feeling and your customers will feel too full and uncomfortable if you overfeed them. I really appreciate when things are “chunked down” into bite-sized morsels. That’s probably why I’m such a big fan of e-courses.
You are so right on target with this post. I was on a few (to be kept anonymous) marketer’s lists and it was truly unbelievable. A constant stream of buy this, buy that… every email was a pitch. Even internet marketing 101 drills it into your head to give before you ask to receive. And these were fairly high profile people. All they were doing was preying on newbies. Pure and simple. I’ve not cut down my “must read guru emails” to 5 people.
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I think that you have to provide enough information to entice the people who are interested in that topic to take the next step. Once they take the next step, you supply them with some more info. And just repeat until they have consumed all of the content. And it’s these people who read right through until the end that are your best customers.
So if you can track this, you can provide only them with additional information that will help them.
I’m definitely guilty of doing this often. I try to put in as much information in my blog posts to cover all bases. But I’ve indeed found most people get tired of reading a wall of text after a while and actually prefer less.