Marketing with Nuance - Lesson's from a Puppeteer

Coad Canada Puppets tour the world. They have performed in nearly twenty countries and won numerous awards. They are frequent performers at puppetry festivals across North America and abroad. Early on, founder Luman Coad realized that a great puppeteer is a master of nuance, permitting the audience to use their imagination to fill in the gaps whenever possible.

So what does this have to do with sensible marketing? Just this - the oft repeated truism that 'less is more' is oft repeated for a good reason. It is true.

I received an email today from local CRM software company. I vaguely remember signing up for some information a year ago, and this company has been regularly keeping my advised of their latest wonderful offerings and success stories. I promptly delete each message since I'm not in the market for a CRM system and there is little else of interest in their emails. They could use a few lessons in adding value to their email from Constant Contact, but that is a topic for another day.

Today's email, however, varied greatly from the past. This one contained several paragraphs of verbiage describing the many benefits of the software. I can only guess that the goal of the email was for me to become so enamored by the text that I would respond for more information, though that call to action was not clear. Knowing that the reader was, to date, just another vaguely interested prospect, how much the more effective would the writer have been with a short succinct message related to CRM, or a quick graphic and byline, and an call to action to stimulate further interaction? Why not take the time to review the message and distill it to the most powerful thoughts, then, like the Coad Canada Puppets, leave the reader to fill in the gaps?

Louis Armstrong was another famous master of nuance. They said he could squeeze more soul out of one note than other could from a whole riff. Effective use of nuance is evidence of mastery.
Enough said.