Ask Us ANYTHING!!! 🤔 The "Maybe" Button That Lifts Clicks 14% | Ep. 504

Ben from Miami asked a question that many marketers are quietly facing: his team is using AI tools to pump out more content than ever, yet engagement is dropping. Jay Schwedelson’s answer cuts against the grain of the efficiency narrative. The problem, he argues, isn’t volume—it’s polish. The more AI-generated content looks and sounds like AI-generated content, the less people want to engage with it. What is working instead, across industries from manufacturing to healthcare to nonprofits, is lo-fi, authentic, behind-the-scenes material. The episode then walks through several specific, testable tactics that have produced measurable lifts.

The “Maybe” Button and Other Anti-AI CTAs

The most surprising finding Jay shares involves call-to-action buttons. In head-to-head tests, buttons that signal hesitation or reluctance—phrased like “Let Me See” (spelled L-E-M-M-E C), “Fine, I’ll Look,” “Show Me the Thing,” “I Guess,” or “Okay, What Is This?”—produced a 14% higher click-through rate than standard CTAs like “Download,” “Register,” or “Buy Now.” The mechanism is psychological: a “maybe” button grabs attention for a millisecond because it is the most un-AI thing possible. It feels human, uncertain, and conversational. It does not pressure the user, and that lack of pressure paradoxically makes people more willing to click.