If you only had one chance to send an email out to clients or prospects, what would it say?

Why?  Because behavioral research shows that people who merely are asked about a certain activity will be more likely to act. The measurement effects the outcome!

How do we know this? Examples of this are well documented in the book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Here are some interesting cases:

• If you ask people if they are going to vote the day before the election it increases their probability to vote by 25%.
• A survey to 40,000 people asking them if they intended on buying a new car in the next six months increased purchase rates by 35%.
• A university looking to educate students on the need for a tetanus shot found that only 3% of attendees to a lecture asking them to get a shot did so.  However, a similar group who had the same lecture but were given a map to the college health center complied at a 28% rate!

The concept is called "priming," and works at a subconscious level of the brain. The question above does not ask them to buy, only if they are going to at some point in the next three years.

Interested in creating a survey? I would recommend an easy to use tool like Survey Monkey.