Is your email inbox cluttered with a large number of unread messages? Do you pick hardly one or two messages out of those to read and proceed with the action? This is an emotional choice any recipient makes. The emails you open are usually the ones that follow marketing psychology practices to lure the users into opening or acting on it. Although it seems a bit complicated, the implementation of this strategy will have assured results as it creates a good impression on the recipients as soon as they view your email. Before beginning with the most effective tricks of marketing psychology on an email campaign, let us start with the basics.
Marketing psychology is the process of integrating various psychological principles into your content, emails, marketing, and sales strategy to grab the attention of a maximum number of audience. Here, you look for common patterns in humans and learn how it affects their buying decisions. It aids you in creating compelling materials that are capable of engaging the users and troubleshoot their problems quickly.
Implementation of marketing psychology in emails generally involve sending promotional emails aimed to educate the prospects about how your products and services provide the ultimate solution to their problem. But, how to include it in your campaigns to increase people’s engagement and curiosity about your brand? Let’s look through some of the must-know tips below.
Colors and visuals will have a dramatic impact on your firm’s conversion rate. Color is something that’s around us, but we rarely pay attention to its impact on business. They are tied to cultural, emotional, as well as social connotations. Hence using them wisely in your brand logo or email messages will drive more leads to your business and thereby increases the revenue. Award-winning marketing agency Zero Above supports this statement. It says, on average, people make a subconscious decision about a product within 90 seconds of seeing it for the first time and up to 90% of that (subconscious) decision is based on color alone.
Furthermore, QuickSprout research reveals that 85% of customers say that color is a primary reason for buying any product. As color is known to activate an emotional response from the recipients, you must include only those colors in your email that triggers the most favorable result for your business. Also, while adding the tone for the CTAs, make sure it is complementary to the email to get the best results.
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is an imperative psychological aspect where you bring out the social fear or general anxiety among the prospects by creating an idea of missing out on any product, experience, or event. When you couple this sense of scarcity with email campaigns, you can generate a strong response from the audience. A well-known experiment by Worchel, Lee, and Adewole on a total of 200 female undergraduates discussed the effects of scarcity and FOMO on the humans. In this experiment, they showed students similar cookies in two jars and invited them to rate the value of these jars.
When scarcity was introduced in one of the jars by removing 8 cookies out of it, students chose the jar with only 2 cookies. They were told that a decrease in the number of cookies was due to the high demand for it. Whereas, the increase in supply was due to a lack of demand for the cookies. Result of this study indicates that cookies in scarce supply were rated as more desirable than the ones in abundant supply. Businesses can use this strong aversion to losing in email campaigns to get a quick response.
Describe the popularity of your products and inform them that there is a limited supply of this edition. Instead of mentioning “Special 30% discount” in your subject line, come up with something like, “Special 30% discount expires in 2 days”. It will give a sense of urgency and push them to act at the moment.
Customers usually look at other customer’s (favorite celebrity or a trusted friend) actions while making any purchase decision. Sometimes, a product review from an unknown person or a blog post with a lot of social shares will have the same amount of influence on buyers. According to the Opinion Research Corporation study, 61% of customers go through online reviews before making any purchase decision. Also, humans trust the consumer reviews nearly 12 times more than descriptions from manufacturers, according to a survey of US internet users conducted by online video review site EXPO.
Social proof is the method where marketers make use of this human mindset to influence the buying decisions of prospects. You can use social proof in various ways in your email marketing strategies. One most straightforward way is to use testimonials as well as user ratings in your emails. It influences the way your subscribers view your brand. You can also ask celebrities to endorse your product and use those messages in your promotional campaigns. Such messages will prominently increase the sales rate.
Remember that you don’t need to include long testimonials to impress your audience. Sometimes, a single line or a quote from a customer is more than enough. If you are running short of space, make use of links to your testimonials and reviews section.
In general terms, reciprocity is an act where individuals exchange goods or services for mutual benefit. Philip Kunz, a sociologist at Brigham Young University, conducted one of the most revealing studies on reciprocity. He decided to send Christmas cards to strangers by collecting directories for nearby towns and picking out around 600 names. He sent cards to these people, and surprisingly, about five days later, responses started coming back. 35% of people sent him a card wishing a merry Christmas. Businesses can use this reciprocal technique to quickly grow the relationships with the customers and get more sales.
You can send some gifts to subscribers. They will more likely purchase your product to show their gratitude. You can give a lot of things for free to strengthen the bond with the existing customers and gain the attention of potential clients. The gifts can include an actual product, discount, free service, video course, eBook, or zero delivery charges. The probability of users taking the desired action on your next email campaign will increase drastically with this method.
In the psychology of the business world, the word “free” will always present a large number of opportunities for marketers. It is a basic human instinct to take the path that includes less financial commitments. Hence enticing someone to open your messages or buy from you with this popular word will have the most impact on the conversions. Most of the marketers believe that the word “free” in the subject line will raise red flags with the spam filter. But, the studies by various researchers proved it wrong recently. Test conducted by HubSpot revealed that the word “free” would not hurt email’s deliverability. Hence, you can add this word to your email subjects without hesitation.
It will catch the recipient’s attention and generate clicks quickly. The subject lines that included this word had a nearly identical result to those that did not. Analysis by Return Path on subject lines for 2,900+ domains across several categories for 2 weeks reveals an interesting pattern.
Image Source: Return Path
How to use this in your email marketing campaigns? The answer is pretty simple. All you need to do is use the word “free” in any of the eye-catching places logically. You can include it in your subject line (in brackets or parentheses, at the beginning, or end, etc.), the title of the email body, or a CTA (call-to-action) button. Before placing it in various locations, we suggest you perform A/B testing. It helps you in clearly understanding the prominence of this word for recipients.
So, now you know how emotions play a significant role in the conversion rate of any email marketing campaign. Emotions will escalate the likelihood of recipients to act on it. Be it in the form of a creative or pragmatic newsletter or other campaign routines, understanding the mindset of customers and acting accordingly will help you accomplish the marketing goals. Hence, if you are planning to launch any email campaigns, do not forget to include the psychological hacks mentioned in this article.
