The Psychology Behind Effective Email Campaigns: What Really Works

email campaign, email marketing

Marketing is all about psychology. You’ve got something to sell, and you want to persuade a time-poor audience that your messaging, your brand, and your email campaigns are worthy of their precious attention. Beyond that, you want them to take specific actions through your email campaigns that ultimately end in making a purchase.

To achieve those things, you have to know what your audience wants. Which is as much to say, you have to understand how people’s minds work. What sort of things do they find attractive and attention-worthy, what will persuade them to give up their precious time and part with their equally precious money?

These psychological aspects are brought into particular focus with email marketing. Email remains one of the most popular and effective marketing channels. It generates typical returns on investment of an astonishing 3600% – that’s £36 income for every £1 spent! It’s 40% more effective than social channels like Facebook and X/Twitter for customer acquisition. 61% of people say they like the idea of receiving promotional emails on a weekly basis. And in 2023, 52% of people made a purchase directly from an email.

Yet these amazing performance statistics can’t hide the fact that email marketing is ultra-competitive. On average, people receive well more than 100 emails every day. It’s, therefore, hardly surprising that two-thirds of marketing emails never even get opened.

With odds like that, you can’t leave it to chance that your emails will be among the one of three that do get opened. You have to do everything in your power to make your emails as attractive, attention-grabbing and persuasive as possible. And at that stage, you’ve only got the subject line to work with!

This is where understanding the psychology of email marketing comes into its own. So, for this blog, we’ve put together a list of tried and tested email marketing practices that we know from experience help to boost those all-important open and click rates. And we’ve sat down on a comfy couch, channelled our inner Freud, and thought carefully about the psychology of why they work.

Personalisation

Let’s start with an easy one. You don’t have to be a psychologist to understand that people like to be treated as individuals and that personalisation, therefore, has a huge impact across all marketing. For emails, roughly three-quarters of people say they will only engage with personalised content.

As for the psychology behind it, it boils down to people feeling valued and understood. An email with their name in the subject line makes it feel like the sender has gone to the effort to message them individually. Even if, rationally, we know it has been done by a simple mail merge automation, it still helps to press buttons that trigger a positive emotional response.

Offering an incentive

On some levels, it feels like the crudest of marketing tactics – “open this email, and we’ll give you a freebie!” It’s almost like bribing someone to like you. But on a psychological level, offering incentives makes perfect sense. It’s based on the principle of reciprocity, which describes how we feel more inclined to do something asked of us if we’re offered something in return first. It’s not just a case of obligation, either. The ‘one good turn deserves another’ principle is built deep into how we relate to one another as social creatures.

Sending again and again and again

Intuition might suggest that bombarding people with emails is a bad idea – that’s pretty much what spam is, right? And yes, it’s true that there is a line beyond which the frequency and volume of emails you send becomes more pestering than persuasive.

But up to that point, it’s actually a very, very good idea to send emails regularly and consistently. Remember the statistic about 61% of people saying they like to receive promotional emails from businesses once a week? It can be explained psychologically by the principle of mere exposure.

Put simply, the more familiar things are, the more likely we are to like them. An email dropping into our inbox every week from the same company, with a similar tone and message to the subject line and a similar design to the emails – it becomes part of our routine, and it contains no hidden surprises. We’re more likely to open it and respond.

Drip campaigns

A variation on the theme of sending emails out regularly and consistently is the drip campaign. A newsletter is a classic example of making use of the mere exposure principle in email marketing when you send out emails with more or less the sole purpose of maintaining regular contact.

Drip campaigns are a little different. They involve a sequence of emails spaced out over a period of time, and they are structured to build up to something. Usually, it’s a big selling message. So, there is that element of building familiarity. But that doesn’t seem sufficient alone to explain why drip campaigns enjoy open rates up to 80% higher than single-send emails.

A likely explanation is what is known as the foot-in-the-door persuasive technique. The idea is that if you start off with a small request that people have a high likelihood of agreeing to, you then have a ‘foot-in-the-door’ to build up to a bigger request which people would be highly unlikely to cooperate with if you came right out and asked the first time. It works best when the build-up is gradual over several steps, hence the ‘drip drip’ idea behind a drip campaign.

Time-limited offers

Finally, another psychological influence on our behaviour, which surely most of us can relate to, is fear of missing out, or FOMO as it is known. How many times have you done something purely because you have felt the sudden adrenalin rush associated with not wanting to miss out – even if it was something you were not entirely sure you wanted anyway?!

For psychologists, FOMO falls into the fascinating category of social belonging – we ‘fear’ missing out because we are deeply programmed to dread the idea of social exclusion and, therefore, feel anxious about missing out on things other people are doing. It’s what drives the agonies of peer pressure as we are growing up at school. But it also manifests in other ways that are much more useful for marketers, such as the fact that if we’re told we only have a small window of time to do something, we’re more likely to be motivated to do it rather than risk missing out. This is what makes time-limited offers so effective.

The psychology of email marketing, and marketing in general, is a fascinating area to explore that can really supercharge your relationships with your target audiences. If you’re looking for an email marketing agency which has its finger on the pulse of what drives success in campaigns, get in touch to find out how we can help you.

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