I recently came across this oldie but goodie on Roger Dooley’s Neuromarketing blog and wanted to share. (If you don’t follow Roger on social media or regularly read his blog, you should do so immediately. He is awesome!)
Do you want more clicks on your tweets? Or, on your marketing links in emails or ads? Or, if you are a blogger, journalist, or content writer, could you do with more traffic to your articles? A new study by researchers at the BI Norwegian Business School demonstrates that phrasing headlines in a particular way more than doubled clicks, on average.
The Jeopardy Effect
What’s the unique premise of Jeopardy, the long-running TV trivia series? The show’s odd quirk, and perhaps part of its secret to success, is that contestants must phrase their response in the form of a question. Competitors have lost when they had the correct answer but failed to offer it as a question. It turns out that there’s an important lesson there for marketers and writers, too.
The Norwegian researchers found that what is mandatory on Jeopardy also works in attracting clicks to tweets and ad headlines. Multiple experiments showed that writing headlines in question format almost always increased clicks, and sometimes boosted the click rate by as much as 3, 4, and even 5 times! On average, question headlines outperformed declarative headlines by 140 – 150%.
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