Email marketing a very effective channel. With a lot of competition.

Most people consider the email inbox as their personal space. They get annoyed easily when it is being bombarded with marketing emails (especially when it sounds like a bot).

Making your emails stand out is not an easy task anymore. You need to dedicate time and effort to understand the psychology of recipients. This will help you connect with the recipients on an emotional level.

Here are a few psychological hacks to influence your consumers’ decision and tilt it in your favor:

1. Pay close attention to the colors you use

You need to be careful about the email layout and the font colour. Each colour has different psychological properties – it represents something or it evokes a particular feeling, etc.

• Make sure the colour of the email layout and the font fit with your email’s purpose. For example, if you are providing a discount offer, having a lot of green or gold makes sense, as it represents money and growth.
• Make sure the colours are consistent with your brand’s identity. This fosters top of mind recall. It also shows that you brand is trustworthy.
• Characteristics of your target audience – take into account your variables like gender, age group, location, etc of your target audience. Make sure the colour combination used fits with the values they believe in.
• The colour of your CTA button should be something that contrasts or stands out against the background colour. Additionally, the text in the CTA button should be in alignment with colour of the CTA box.
  

2. Make them feel special and exclusive

Everyone wants to feel special. People want to possess things that make them part of a select few.

• Invite them to join/apply for exclusive membership. Make sure to mention the special benefits they will receive and how their treatment will differ from other regular customers.
• Provide special offers to customers who have completed a milestone – usage limit or for being a loyal customer, etc. You could also provide personalized offers to customers on their birthdays or any other important days.

3. Arouse curiosity

Curiosity occurs when there is a gap between what we know and what we want to know. This gap is what makes us eager to learn.
Marketers can apply this concept to email marketing by writing a subject line and a preview text that teases them to open the email or an email body that makes them curious enough to go ahead click on the CTA.

• You can use questions as headlines or indirect headlines to arouse curiosity.
  
• Readers should have some idea about what you are talking about. Otherwise, they may not open your email or click the CTA.
• Give a tiny glimpse of what the reader can expect and ask them to signup or subscribe to see the full content.
• Mention what readers will learn or how will they benefit from the content on the landing page.

4. The first and the latest element should have a lasting effect

When people are presented with a list of items, they are most likely to recall the first few (primacy effect) or the last few (recency effect) items.
Designing your email campaigns with these concepts in mind will help ensure that the important messages are being noticed and remembered by the readers.

• Ensure that the subject line conveys the most important aspects (offers, deadline, what can the reader expect, etc.) of the email.
• Make sure the preheader text is personalized.
• The one message that you want all readers to know should be placed at the beginning of the email body.
• If it is a newsletter which has links to different articles or products, the most important/valuable one should be placed at the top.
• If the email is long or has a lot of content, you can add a P.S. line to leverage the recency effect. Use it to repeat your CTA and underline how important it is.

5. Make things rhyme a bit

The rhyme-as-reason effect (or Eaton-Rosen phenomenon) is a cognitive bias whereupon a saying or aphorism is judged as more accurate or truthful when it is rewritten to rhyme.
In simple terms, when a statement rhymes, people generally tend to believe it is true. This is due to the fact that our brains find it easier to process such statements. Rhyming statements are also considered to be more aesthetically pleasing.
This is an old marketing trick, it has been used in advertisements since time immemorial.

You can apply this effect by making the subject line, the preview text, the key points of the copy or the CTA text, rhyme. Just don’t overdo it. Aim for playful, not corny.

6. Persuade people with social proof

Social proof as a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others reflect correct behavior for a given situation. According to Robert Cialdini, social proof is one of the six key principles of influence used to persuade people.

• Use transactional emails to collect customer feedback as they are more likely to give feedback after a checkpoint – signing up, upgrade, subscribing to your blog, etc.
• Showcase testimonials where customers have explicitly mentioned the benefits (savings, growth, etc) they have received after using your product/service.
• Sharing user-generated content (videos, images, articles) is a great way to convince your prospects to go ahead and check your product.
• Add a review or a testimonial written by the prospect’s friends for the same product.
• Add badges or one-liners (taken from reviews or testimonials) that you received from a third party (could be a rating agency, an aggregator, an influencer, a leading magazine in your niche, etc).
• Influence the reader’s decision by highlighting the most popular or highly rated products/services.
• Add the logos or names of reputable brands that you have as customers.
  

Conclusion

Merely doing A/B testing and analyzing the data is not enough to succeed in email marketing. At the end of the day, you are sending these emails to humans, not bots. Appealing to their feelings will surely make your campaigns more attractive.
There are many psychological concepts that you can apply to email marketing. But the above-mentioned ones are effective as well as easy-to-implement. They will help you get started.

Psychological Hacks For A Better Email Marketing Experience

PS. Also, try to keep your emails shorter than this article 😃
PPS. I should probably rhyme that. But I won’t do that. Cause I’m not good at that.