Creating Curiosity
I noticed a great example today of a story teaser that was deliberately designed to get you to click through and read more.
It was for one of entertainment stories in the Herald Sun, the online version of Melbourne’s largest circulating metropolitan daily newspaper (and claimed to be Australia’s most popular daily paper with more than 1.5 million readers).
Here it is:
As you can see from the last sentence, it’s deliberately incomplete and of course being an unfinished sentence it is designed to pique your curiosity … to get you to click and read the full article to find out what he really does think of his brother.
Having this type of “cliffhanger” is quite popular as a “plot device” in television series … keeping you glued to the screen over ad breaks or making sure you watch the next episode. You want to find out how the situation is resolved!
As creatures of ‘completion’, we want to complete what is incomplete.
Equally, this tactic can work in other mediums — like it has been used here in this example on the Herald Sun home page. For example, you could use it in blog post excerpts, on the outside of a direct mail envelope, within an email message that prompts you to click through to a website … in a printed newsletter so readers will be keen to read the next edition.
Keep the cliffhanger in mind to see if you can incorporate it into your own communication.
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