Make It Attractive (Salience and Presentation)

The Science Behind Make It Attractive (Salience and Presentation)

The principle of making things attractive, sometimes called salience in the behavioural science literature, is built on a deceptively simple insight: people do not respond to information in the abstract. They respond to how that information is packaged, framed, and presented to them in the moment. David Halpern, former head of the UK government's Behavioural Insights Team (colloquially known as the 'Nudge Unit'), documented this principle extensively in his 2015 book, drawing on both experimental research and real-world policy interventions. The core finding is that surface features, visual design, personalisation, the emotional tone of a message, whether something feels like it was written for you specifically, profoundly influence whether people engage, act, or ignore.

The psychology behind this principle is rooted in what Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman called System 1 thinking, our fast, automatic, intuitive mode of processing. When a message lands in someone's inbox or on their phone screen, they are not carefully reading every word and rationally weighing the content. Instead, they are making a near-instantaneous judgement: does this feel relevant to me? Does this feel personal? Is this worth my attention? Visual cues, familiar names, and conversational language all signal 'this matters to you' before the brain has consciously processed a single sentence. Generic, templated communications, no matter how well-written, fail this first test and are discarded before the message even lands.

Personalisation is one of the most well-documented levers within this principle. Research across direct mail, email, and digital communications consistently shows that addressing someone by their first name improves open and response rates, but true personalisation goes further than a name merge field. It includes referencing specific, relevant details, the condition someone was treated for, the practitioner they saw, the time elapsed since their last visit. This kind of contextual personalisation signals that the communication was constructed with the recipient in mind, not blasted to a database of thousands. Halpern's team found that personalised letters sent by the UK government, including the recipient's specific details rather than generic instructions, dramatically outperformed their standard equivalents in prompting action.

Visual distinctiveness also plays a critical role. In a cluttered digital environment, a message that looks different from the surrounding noise captures attention through what psychologists call the 'von Restorff effect', the tendency to remember and respond to things that stand out from their context. For patient re-engagement specifically, this means that a plain, conversational SMS can outperform a beautifully designed HTML email precisely because it doesn't look like marketing. It looks like a message from a person, and our brains are wired to prioritise human-to-human communication over institutional broadcast.

The Research

How to Apply This in Your Practice

The starting point for applying this principle in your practice is to audit your current re-engagement communications with fresh eyes, not as someone who built them, but as a lapsed patient receiving them cold. Ask yourself: does this look like a personal message, or does it look like marketing? If your re-engagement touchpoint is an HTML email with a logo header, a promotional image, and a generic subject line like 'We miss you at [Clinic Name]!', you are almost certainly losing patients at the point of first impression, before they have read a single word of copy.

For SMS re-engagement, which research consistently shows outperforms email for response rates in healthcare settings, the goal is to write messages that read like they were sent by the practitioner personally, not by a software platform. A message like 'Hi Sarah, it's James from Coastal Chiro. I was thinking about the progress you made with your lower back last year, just wanted to check in and see how you're going. Happy to chat or book a session if you need it' is categorically different from 'Reminder: You haven't visited Coastal Chiropractic in over 6 months. Book your next appointment today.' Both messages are sent from the same system, but only one feels human. That distinction is the entire mechanism through which this principle operates.

Personalisation should extend beyond the patient's name to include condition-specific and practitioner-specific references wherever your practice management software allows it. If your system records the treating practitioner and the presenting complaint, use both. 'Hi Marcus, it's Dr. Priya here, I remember we were making real headway with your shoulder before life got in the way. Would love to help you get back on track' is a message that passes the human test. It references a real relationship, a real person, and a real context. Even if the message is automated, the salience it creates is genuine because the underlying data is genuine. The patient's brain processes it as personal because it is, in the details that matter.

Where your re-engagement strategy includes email or digital touchpoints, perhaps a follow-up to an SMS, or a channel used when you don't have a mobile number, apply the von Restorff principle deliberately. Strip back the visual design so it reads like a real email from a colleague, not a campaign from a marketing department. Include the practitioner's actual photo and signature. Use a subject line written in plain language, as if typed by a human ('Checking in on your recovery, Sarah'). These are not design shortcuts, they are deliberate applications of the insight that human-seeming communications outperform broadcast-seeming ones, because our brains are wired to attend to people, not platforms.

Seeing It in Action

Your Action Plan

1. 1Audit your current re-engagement communications from the patient's perspective, open them on a phone as if you're receiving them cold, and ask honestly whether they feel personal or promotional. If they look like marketing, redesign them to look like a message from a person.
2. 2Shift your primary re-engagement channel to SMS for lapsed patients where possible, and write message templates in the practitioner's voice, using first-person language, the patient's first name, and a reference to their specific treatment history or condition.
3. 3Configure your practice management software or re-engagement platform (such as Routiq) to pull practitioner name and presenting complaint fields into your message templates, so personalisation goes beyond a name merge and includes genuinely relevant clinical context.
4. 4Where email is used as a re-engagement channel, strip back the visual design to plain text or minimal formatting, include the practitioner's photo and personal signature, and write subject lines that sound like they came from a human being rather than a campaign scheduler.
5. 5Send re-engagement messages from a number or address that patients can actually reply to, and assign someone on your team to monitor and respond to replies within the same business day, because the salience you create with a personal message is immediately undermined if the patient replies and hears nothing back.