Today, my business partner and I will send 43,000 prospects an email, something we plan to do every month.
We hope to land new business right away as a result.
But we're really counting on our monthly email, one day, to activate prospects' availability bias.
Availability bias is a flaw in thinking. We all have it. It's activated by a recent event that grabs our attention.
For example, we're much more likely to fear our kid will be groped by a teacher after learning about such an incident from the news. We overreact by overestimating a groping incident's probability. We remove our kid from school for a week.
Availability bias savaged air travel after September 11, even though the probability of a terrorist attack was miniscule. Availability bias is also the reason people believe vaccines cause autism, which of course is nonsense.
As a rule, we overweigh evidence that readily comes―that's easily available―and that has grabbed our attention recently. That's because the evidence is easily retrieved from our memory.
Essentially, we're all lazy thinkers.
In sending our email, my partner and I assume at least a few of those 43,000 prospects will need our magic in the next several months.
