Effective Emails- Using the Neuroscience of Fonts to Sell

"I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture."  - Steve Jobs 

With all the tributes to Steve Jobs, we often forget that the man helped us write in a more aesthetically appealing way.

Jobs was the first to give us a real choice of fonts, and thus the ability to express ourselves digitally with emotion, clarity and variety.

Using a simple thing as fonts has powerful abilities to sell and market not only to surgeons, but also the executive suite of the hospital. 

Choice of Font

If you need to convince a surgeon, hospital CEO, or OR nurse to perform some kind of task, you should describe that task in a simple, easy to read font

Anything from "please meet with me" to "attend a lab" is really a request to perform a task.

 Since this phenomenon is related to the concept of cognitive fluency, you should also make the type size easy to read and use simple words and sentence structure.

These steps will minimize the perceived effort needed to accomplish the task, and your success rate will increase. 

A  study was done asking two different groups to estimate the amount of time the following exercise would take to complete. Both groups had the exact same exercise with only the font being different. 

The results showed that people estimated it would take twice as long to perform the exercises when the two-sentence description was printed in Brushy (a rather fancy font) rather than Arial ( a simple, sans-serif font).

If you want the reader to take an action, use simple fonts. 

Why do you think restaurants use font thats difficult to read?

Subconsciously if there's more effort to read the description, there must have been more effort (thus better quality) in making the dinner you're about to eat. 

Think about the effect you want after the person reads your message and base your decision off the level of cognitive fluency.

ALWAYS refer back to the system(s)

It is always vital to refer to the work of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics winner Daniel Kahneman.

His work has a central thesis stating that there exists a dichotomy between two modes of thought:

• System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious
• System 2: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious