You’re not competing with other businesses. You’re competing with life.
Time used to come in chunks.
You’d call someone, leave a message, and if they rang back next week nobody panicked. Letters took days. Replies took days. Normal.
Even marketing had edges. A 30-second ad. A brochure you printed once and lived with for a year because reprinting cost money and nobody wanted to rewrite it anyway.
Now? Time isn’t chunky. It’s shattered. Which means the businesses that win aren’t the loudest. They’re the ones with systems that catch people at the right moment.
People don’t “have time” like they used to. They have weird little gaps:
- 12 seconds in the lift
- 30 seconds before a meeting
- 6 seconds while pretending to listen on Teams
- 2 minutes while waiting for a quote, an Uber, or a kid to stop yelling
That’s why everything feels faster. Not because humans evolved overnight, but because the spaces between distractions got smaller.
Attention didn’t die. It just got picky.
People will happily watch a 40-minute YouTube video on fixing a leaking tap. They’ll binge a whole season of something they don’t even like that much. They’ll read a long post if it hits the right nerve.
So when we say ‘nobody reads anymore’, it lets us blame short attention spans instead of admitting that it might be our content.
If they care, they’ll give you time. If they don’t, you won’t get a second.
So the question isn’t “how do I stop the scroll?”, it’s how do I earn the next two seconds from the right person?
What people actually decide when they see your post
They’re not judging your grammar. They’re not thinking, “Ah yes, excellent brand tone”.
They’re deciding one thing: Is this for me? That’s it. For me or not for me. Which means your first line has one job: make it obvious who it’s for and why it matters.
Like:
- “If your quotes go quiet after you send them, here’s the follow-up that gets replies without discounting.”
- “If your emails get opened but nobody clicks, it’s probably not the offer. It’s the timing.”
- “If repeat work is patchy, it might not be your service. It’s your follow-up.”
And notice what doesn’t show up:
“In today’s fast-paced world…”
“We’re excited to share…”
“Let’s talk about…”
That’s the internet version of the excuse me… throat-clearing. And the internet does not wait for throat-clearing.
Don’t stop the scroll but you can make scanning easy.
People skim. They graze. They scan. If you drop a wall of text on them, you’re asking for commitment before you’ve earned it. So make it easy to consume:
- short paragraphs
- punchy first sentence
- subheads that actually say something
- one point per section
- payoff early (don’t hide it like a Netflix twist)
Email is the same game just with different rules. When someone opens their inbox, they’re not lovingly reading every email like it’s a handwritten note.
They’re scanning a list. In that scan, you get three signals:
From name
Subject line
Preview text (the bit most people waste)
That’s all they see before they decide to open.
So if your From name is “no-reply@” or “Marketing Team”, you’re starting with negative trust. And if your preview text is “View in browser” or “Having trouble seeing this email?”, you’ve thrown away free persuasion.
Subject + preview should work together.
Not fancy. Just useful. But the real secret to success for you isn’t in one email, it’s what happens after you send that email. If someone opens but doesn’t click, they get a follow-up that helps.
If they click, they get the next step. If they go quiet after a quote, they get a nudge that doesn’t feel needy.
Clickbait exists for a reason
Yes, this whole two-second thing is basically why clickbait is everywhere.
Headlines decide whether your content gets a chance. Clickbait exists because attention is scarce.
But if the headline promises more than the content delivers, trust drops. Unsubscribes go up. And the algorithm quietly learns your stuff disappoints. Trust is harder to rebuild than attention is to earn. So clickbait might win the click but lose the customer.
What you actually want is truthful intrigue:
- specific enough to attract the right person
- interesting enough to earn the pause
- accurate enough that the content delivers
That’s because people aren’t in the same mindset all day. People move through different modes:
- Scroll mode: bored, curious, half-present
- Inbox mode: sorting, deleting, saving what matters
- Intent mode: actively trying to solve something
You can’t talk to all three the same way. If you write everything like it’s intent mode, you lose them before they start. If you write everything like it’s scroll mode, you get attention but not action.
The good stuff does both: earn the pause then deliver value fast enough that the pause turns into commitment.
Time didn’t vanish. Tolerance for irrelevant content vanished.
So write for the moment they’re in, not the world you wish they were in. And don’t rely on luck to meet them there. If your follow-up depends on memory, you’re competing with chaos. Build systems that remember for you.
A little about Spinifex
Spinifex has been helping businesses communicate and sell for decades and we’re still obsessed with what actually gets people to act.
Need some help doing it?
If you want your follow-up to run in the background (without you having to remember it), start here:
