Do you want to get more leads and maximize the performance of your newsletters? You’re in the right place because email marketing is much more than sending mass emails to everyone.
On the contrary, it’s necessary that you have a very extensive and quality list of leads who are honestly interested in your brand and what you have to say. That’s the foundation of a successful email marketing campaign.
In any case, email marketing best practices are the most efficient and direct way to reach your subscribers with quality content, through personalized messages and that's the key to boost traffic to your offer. In fact, email marketing is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter at getting new customers, according to McKinsey.
However, you must take it easy when preparing your strategy. If what you’re looking for is more purchases from the beginning, it may not work. Your leads need to be ready to make the purchase, so it’s useless to send them emails with product examples in your first emails.
What you can do instead is to give value to your leads and improve their lives according to their needs and aspirations. At this point, it’s important to take into account the buyer’s journey to know what content is the most appropriate to offer.
So, it’s more beneficial to set small goals to meet progressively and increase your leads’ engagement at the same time. This way, you’ll increase engagement by offering free guides, information, demos, etc.
Maybe, in your first 5 emails, you can concentrate on adding value and solving your audience’s problems, and later, in your fifth or sixth email, you can make your offer and start selling. After giving value to your audience, your leads will love you even more.
Why should you use email automation? Because it works and it will save you time and money.
Additionally, it’s easy to learn and if you subscribe to a good platform because you’ll receive powerful tools such as reports to help you understand your campaigns performance, information on how to optimize your emails, what type of calls to action are most effective, what is the best time to send your emails, what topics offer you a higher open rate, etc.
Also, they will give you predesigned templates to develop professional emails in case you don’t have previous knowledge of design or programming and some of the best-known email automation tools you can use are:
These platforms will make your life easier and you’ll reach more leads. By the way, if by chance you're new to email marketing, the terms and words you should know are the following:
- Subscription: When a person signs up on your list to start receiving your emails.
- Double opt-in: To subscribe to your email list, they need to confirm the subscription via email.
- SPAM: Emails sent to people who have not subscribed.
- Drop out: A person who wants to stop receiving your emails.
- Trigger: An event that causes something to happen.
- Sequence: Emails sent automatically after an event occurs.
- CTR (click-through rate): Percentage of clicks on your newsletters, resulting by dividing the number of clicks by the number of emails sent.
- Lead nurturing: The automation of emails and a good inbound marketing campaign, you turn a subscriber into a buyer.
Now, several questions may arise before launching your email marketing campaigns
How can I influence my leads to take action and improve my open rates? Are my emails persuasive enough?
We will give you ideas to take your sales funnel to the next level. For making your emails stand out, you should implement the latest advances in social psychology and neuroscience to exploit some behavioral patterns when developing your emails.
Email marketing best practices and behavioral psychology
Email marketing strategies are often unclear and rather based on intuition. However, the latest advances in social psychology and neuroscience allow us to discover some patterns of behavior that you can apply when developing your emails and we want you to know some psychological tricks to increase the impact of your email marketing campaign.
1. A clear CTA (call to action)
A CTA will act as a trigger in your emails. So, you must pay special attention to both the graphic design of the trigger and its copy.
While you prepare your emails, you must put yourself in your leads’ shoes to assess whether they will interact with your content or not. So, make your CTA in a different color, let's say in red or orange and you’ll grab attention naturally.
By the way, make sure that content is properly viewed on all devices and that your CTAs are completely functional.
2. Free information that adds value
If you want to increase your database, don't hesitate for a second to create free downloadable materials for your audience and free information that is valuable. Of course, don’t display all your knowledge but make sure to offer a great deal for your leads.
3. Psychology of colors
The colors we perceive change our emotions and sensations. So, you can harness the power of colors in your email marketing campaigns.
However, there is no specific color that causes greater conversion possibilities. If you were looking to know if blue or orange helps users buy your product more than green or red, you will not find it. The psychology of email marketing campaigns when it comes to color is not that straightforward.
The effect of colors in your email messages is not due so much to the color itself as to its relationship with the rest of the elements. It's more about what's known as the isolation effect. An approach that states that any element, including color, that stands out is easier to remember.
So, if the color of the CTA stands out clearly from the rest of the elements, you will improve conversions. Therefore, before choosing the color it’s necessary to look at the rest of the elements to avoid competing for attention with the buy button.
In the same way as the colors, images can also generate emotions. With images, you can get attention too, and induce your leads to imagine how your product would look like in their own lives.
The truth is that most users review the emails they receive superficially, so an email with a lot of text could have worse results than an email that relies on graphic content.
4. The word Free
Another aspect that you can explore when it comes to psychology in email marketing campaigns is to capture the attention of users thanks to the power of free.
Just the fact that the word "free" appears in a newsletter means that you will receive dozens of requests. For many people, it is impossible to resist. That’s why including the word free is one of the preferred techniques of marketers, and in email marketing campaigns, it causes conversions.
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So, include "free" in your email subjects, headlines, or calls to action to increase the open rates of your email campaigns.
5. Discounts
From discounts of 10%, the offers are so attractive that the opening rates increase. The subject of the email must always show the highest discount.
In addition, insert in the email the old prices of the crossed out and small product next to the new prices. Consequently, customers will have a clear vision of the savings (or advantage) they obtain by buying that product.
There are many reasons (or excuses) for doing sales promotions: holiday sales, summer sales, loyalty bonuses, anniversaries, holidays - there is always an excuse!
6. Social proof
This item is a potent motivator of consumer behavior since people act as a consequence of a positive influence to take similar actions. Seeing very high scores on products or comments will motivate people to buy or consume the same services. For setting up your social proof strategy you can highlight:
- Customer Testimonials. A campaign in which you share comments from satisfied customers, including image, name and job title to give it credibility, can increase the interest and curiosity of users.
- Success stories. You can use downloadables that talk about success stories from your clients to further the positive comments described in the previous point.
- Social sharing. Nowadays, social networks are the first place a user goes to find information about a company. Therefore, it always facilitates user interaction with your social networks, including buttons to share your content quickly.
Combine email marketing campaigns with your networking strategy to increase the reach of your content.
- Number of clients or downloads. You can talk about the number of followers in your networks, the number of downloads of your free guides or the number of users of your products or services.
- Acknowledgments. Your brand may have received recognition such as awards or press mentions. Sharing them with your potential clients can help you improve the credibility of your company.
7. Tailored content
When you personalize the content, you achieve a much closer bond with the user. However, keep in mind that customizing emails does not just mean adding the user’s name to the beginning of the email. Here are some ideas...
- Segment your database by gender, age or location, and take this data into account when creating your emails.
- Create a feeling of two-way communication in which not only you speak, but your potential client can start a conversation with you.
- Understand who your potential customer is, what needs they have and how you can help them meet those needs in order to give the appropriate focus to your email copy.
Of course, make sure that these contents are original, very relevant for visitors and linked to the product or service you offer. In this way, you will ensure that the leads you are capturing are real potential customers
8. FOMO syndrome (fear of missing out)
The shortage of any product in stock or limited offers works very well, especially in personalized limited offers like 50% discount for you, only until 11:59 PM. This sense of urgency is key to getting the user to take action and is widely used in e-commerce.
Note that the key is to understand the mind of the consumer, since understanding this, it is easier to offer you what you want the way you really want it
9. Social nature of humans
Include social buttons in your email marketing campaigns If you really want to reach as many people as possible with the contents of your blog, the best thing you can do is combine all the digital channels.
How? Include in all your submissions buttons that allow your subscribers to share the pieces in their profiles. This will significantly help you multiply visitors to your blog, reaching people you didn't even imagine.
10. Unsubscribe button
At the bottom of each email, your leads must have a way out to unsubscribe. Make it easy for them to leave, your newsletters shouldn't feel like a prison. You will only frustrate them more and in the end, they will find a way to stop receiving your emails. It’s better to unsubscribe than to mark you as SPAM, don't you think?
What's more, Gmail offers the recipient the ability to "mark as spam and unsubscribe". In other words, it makes it easy for you and it takes very little time to do so, so if you don't give it that option, Gmail will do it for you and your reputation will suffer.
This means having quality leads. It’s not worth having a list of 10,000 subscribers if 80% of them never open one of our emails. That's why you need to clean your email list too if a lead hasn't opened any of your emails for X months.
Get to work!
To improve the impact of your mailing campaigns, psychology is convenient. Think that knowing the behavior of your target audience is everything. You and your leads will connect in a deeper way.
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