Last Updated on Dec 20, 2019 by James W
Gone are the days of slick sales tactics and generic blasts to everyone on your email lists. To sell to your audience, it’s important to engage them. You can expect fewer than 50 percent of recipients to open your emails to begin with. When they do, you’d better connect with them before they delete the message.
Persuasive emails grab readers’ attention with the headline. They continue by addressing the audience’s pain points before bringing up the solution. The best email marketing strategies do all of this without being pushy or using cliché sales pitches. If your copy isn’t helping you gain and convert customers, it’s a waste of time. Here are five tricks for using the principles of persuasion to encourage your leads to become your most loyal followers.
Personalise Your Message
Most people enjoy feeling like they’re unique, if not exceptional. If you make them feel like they’re just a number in your massive audience, they may ignore you.
The simplest way to personalise your emails is to use the second-person singular part of speech. Make your readers feel as though you’re addressing them on a one-on-one basis. Instead of using terms such as “you all” or “you guys,” address the recipient as “you.” You can also use their first names in the headline and body of your email to grab their attention.
Listen and Connect
Personalisation can go even further when you generate your message to speak specifically to your audience’s problems. To do this well, you need to understand their biggest dilemmas.
The most persuasive people do this by listening. When you pay attention to what your customers want, you can use their own language to trigger their insecurities. Then, you swoop in to fix it all.
You can use surveys to collect this information. Using a variety of lead-generating techniques also allows you to customise your message to a particular person. If someone requested your ebook about losing weight quickly, you might want to send them slightly different emails than you’d deliver to the prospects who clicked on your link about the best smoothie ingredients.
Give Them Something for Nothing
People love receiving things for free. If you add “buy now” buttons to the first email you send to a new lead, you might not get much of a response. On the other hand, if you dole out valuable content on a regular basis, you’ll keep your prospects around.
One reason for this is reciprocity. This social norm makes people feel obligated to give back to those that have offered a helping hand. If you load up your audience with free tips and resources for solving their problems, they’ll be more likely to pay you back by making a purchase from you.
Another reason that you should help leads for free is that they’ll be more likely to open your emails. People are inundated with digital content nowadays. Your messaging should be more informative and engaging than that of the competition. If your readers are hungry for what you’re offering, they’ll consume it regularly and want to hear from you more.
When you offer indispensable, trustworthy information, you enhance your authority. If you do this on a regular basis, your audience will come to you when they need help.
Be Consistent
That brings us to the concept of consistency. In order to stay on the forefront of people’s minds, you have to repeat yourself. This can feel phony from your perspective, but when you consider that most people ignore 50 to 75 percent of newsletters, you realize that they’ll miss out on your message if you don’t say it again.
Research supports the idea that repeating yourself can change people’s viewpoints. Plus, the mere exposure effect demonstrates that people tend to have an affinity for things with which they’re familiar.
This explains why you might find yourself humming a catchy tune after you’ve heard it several times even if you didn’t like it the first time that you listened to it. Imagine what could happen for your business if you include product photos at the bottom of every email and then hold a flash sale for those items.
Offer Social Proof
Because many people are wary of sales tactics, they may not be swayed when your company tells them how amazing it is. However, they are likely to be influenced by what other people say.
Some examples of social proof include:
- Reviews
- Customer testimonials
- Expert testimonials
- Endorsements from influencers
- Herd mentality
You can work this concept into the messages that you send to your email lists by including short blurbs from customers that praise your company or sending links to interviews with influencers. Real-time counters that show the number of people that have already signed up for your product or service may convince prospects to join in.
Crafting persuasive emails is an art as well as a science. Psychology has shown that these methods can capture readers’ interest and transform them into loyal followers. You don’t have to convert your email lists with a single message. Focus on nurturing your prospects by giving them plenty of constructive information that speaks to their tribulations, asserting yourself as the authority and showing them that other people like what you have to offer. Then, watch as your conversion rates go through the roof.
