Have you noticed that more email marketers are trying to attract your attention at the weekend? Many weekly digests now hit inboxes outside office hours in the hope of getting traction when people are less busy.

As marketers we’re using every trick in the book to capture attention in order to further engagement, and so are our competitors. Email marketing services can help us to optimise email open rates by sending them at the optimum time. And we can read 101 posts to discover 10 ways to write headlines that get our emails opened.

But what if instead of wondering when and how to get more attention, we sought to understand what would compel the person on the receiving end to look forward to hearing from us? When we shift our focus to answering that question, we suddenly stop thinking about how to extract value and concentrate on how to create it instead.

Image by David Ramos.