Do more people read the P.S.?

Copywriting lore says that the P.S. gets the highest readership of any part of your message.

If that’s true, then the P.S. is the best place to highlight a call to action.

This is something I’ve experimented with.

One time I tried a “clean” A/B test to see if moving the call to action into a P.S. would increase the click through rate.

In the control email I used my standard approach of including the CTA at the end of the email body copy.

The result was a statistical dead heat.

(The P.S. approach actually lost by a fraction, but not enough to really call it the loser.)

What about when you have multiple links in an email?

As in, you link to a landing page twice in the body and once in a P.S.?

The link in the P.S. should get a high CTR.

Any time I’ve tried a version of this, the first link always gets the lion’s share of the clicks, and the number of clicks goes down dramatically the further down the email you go—even in the P.S.

This is not what you’d expect if the P.S. was the most read part of the email.

So whence the consensus that the P.S. is such powerhouse of persuasion?

Hint: There’s a clue in the Avengers movies.

I’ll ‘splain on Monday.

P.S. Oh, were you wondering about the results of yesterday’s P.S. poll?

🙂

I’ll share that on Monday too.

Related posts:

  1. Can my email have more than 1 call to action? Subscriber Felix inquires: Should each email only have 1 call to action or can you have a couple like “click on this link to read the blog” and then later in the email ask them to share the blog post via a click to tweet link? Is it ok to...
  2. 3 formatting rules to get your emails read Subscriber Craig emailed me recently about the way I style my messages: === Love to see you write about the format of these emails. In other words, generally one sentence and then a space between. And the width of the text is never longer than a certain amount. Is there...
  3. The X-Files Secret for Must-Read Autoresponder Sequences Should you try to connect all of the emails in an autoresponder sequence together? Or is it OK to build a “sequence” of one-off emails that don’t interrelate? That topic popped up a few days ago in a private forum I belong to. Both approaches *can* work, but in my...
  4. Worried Your Emails Will Annoy Your Subscribers? Read This… A few weeks back my alarm went off as usual at 4:55 a.m. And when I grabbed for my iPhone, I saw that I had a message waiting from Bryan Harris. If you don’t know Bryan, he is THE MAN when it comes to building your email list. He’s created...