I cut three words off the front and retention jumped 14 points

I cut three words off the front and retention jumped 14 points

Let me tell you what happened with a skincare client's Reel. The original cold open was: "So today I wanted to show you the routine that finally cleared my skin." Three-second retention sat at 61%. People bailed before the word "routine."

Here's the thing — "So today I wanted to show you" is throat-clearing. The viewer is paying for a runway they didn't ask for. We rewrote it to start on the verb: "Clears acne in 9 days, and dermatologists hate the price."

And then retention at 3s went from 61% to 75%. Same video, same b-roll, we just deleted the warm-up.

The result: that Reel did 340K views versus the channel's usual 40K.

The lesson: your first word should be a verb or a number, never a windup.