"The world rewards the people who are best at communicating ideas, not the people with the best ideas." - David Perell
Think about it.
All of marketing is simply the art of transferring information from one brain to another in the most effective way possible.
So the question is:
How can you make information more readable, more attractive, more memorable?
One of the most effective ways we've found is by organizing information visually. It's why visuals are a core part of how we build newsletters for every client we work with.
But I don’t want you to take my word for it, let's do a quick exercise.
Determine the pattern in this visual:
Now determine the pattern in this visual:
Which version did you get faster? Which version will you remember for longer?
Visuals help us add additional context to our ideas.
Visuals help viewers reach conclusions faster and better recall the actual idea we're referencing, rather than the specific language used to describe it.
1/ attention.
A lot of things are fighting for your reader's attention right now:
a Slack ping they haven't answered
six unread emails sitting above yours
a text from their kid's school
You've got a few seconds to earn a spot ahead of all that.
And even if they do open your email, if it's walls of text, they won't be reading it with their full attention.
A visual interrupts that drift and pulls their attention right back.
2/ processing.
People don't buy what they don't understand.
One of the best ways to make someone understand what you do is a visual.
Reading is about 6,000 years old, whereas humans have had vision since the beginning of the species, hundreds of thousands of years before anyone invented a written word.
3/ memorability.
People remember about 10% of what they hear three days later.
Add a picture, and that number jumps to 65%.
Your reader isn't buying the day they open your email, they're buying in the future when their pain point finally becomes urgent enough to act on.
...and when that day comes, they buy from the founder they still remember.
All to say, if your newsletter is walls of text, top to bottom, you're going to lose your reader.
Now, let's make this actionable.
What kind of visuals can you use inside newsletters?
We've used a wide range of images for all our clients newsletters.
pictures of them surfing
revenue screenshots
team photos
family photos
founder headshots
behind-the-scenes shots from team offsites
whiteboard sketches from strategy sessions
But the ones we're talking about here are specifically the visuals used to explain the core concept of your newsletter, not the personal or brand-building ones.
So we asked our designer Emelie which kind of visuals work best for that job specifically.
Her answer came down to this:
A newsletter visual has to catch the eye and make sense in under 5 seconds on a phone screen. And ideally, it's carrying the newsletter's biggest insight, not just decorating a minor point.
In practice, that comes down to 3 formats for us at Letter Leverage:
(there are other formats, but these 3 see the most use)
Beyond newsletters, we also run a deep dive research vertical for clients in the capital, finance, and tech space.
That content is dense with revenue numbers, market trends, and industry data. A chart is a really great way to simplify that density. If your readers are in a similar niche, charts are worth considering.
That’s all for today.
I hope you found it useful!
/Nils