The 7 powerful psychology tricks that can boost your email conversions

Use these 7 psychology tips and tricks to boost your email campaigns’ open and click rates and boost your sales.

Bernard Meyer
Jul 24, 2017 · 7 min read
Soundest Ecommerce Email Marketing Blog

Why does it seem that no matter what you do, your email marketing campaigns are just not converting?

The open rate is low, the click rate is lower, and the sales are almost non-existent.

That can be really frustrating, especially when your sales are beginning to slump and you really need to kick your ecommerce into high gear.

After all, email marketing has the highest return on investment (ROI) of other marketing channels like social media, paid search and direct mail. In fact, according to a 2016 survey of marketers, email marketing has a median ROI four times higher than social media.

And yet, the ROI for yours doesn’t seem to be all that great.

Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you. Let’s start with the bad news: you’re not really tapping into the most fundamental aspect of marketing, which is human psychology.

The good news is that you don’t need to get a degree in psychology in order to use email marketing psychology to your advantage.

Instead, you’ll just need to do a little bit of imitation.

Today we’re going to look at 7 examples that show the psychology of email marketing. We’ll also look at the research that explains the psychology and how you can apply that to your ecommerce business.

Table of Contents

  1. Scarcity & the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)
  2. Reciprocity
  3. The Foot in the Door Technique
  4. The Magic Word ‘Free’
  5. Price Anchoring
  6. The Paradox of Choice, or Why Less Is Always Better
  7. Social Proof

1. Scarcity & the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

Scarcity describes a limitation in the amount of some good, like gold or the latest iPhone. This limitation can make people believe the product is very valuable, especially when it’s available for a short time.

For example, if you go on Booking.com, you’ll see that there is often a notification showing that there are only a few rooms left. There’s also another notification above that shows how frequently the rooms have been booked in the last 24 hours.

If you put those notifications together (7 rooms left + booked 31 times in the last 24 hours), you begin to calculate how much time is left until all the rooms are gone, which pressures you to buy now.

Scarcity and unavailability also trigger what’s now known as FOMO, or the Fear of Missing Out.

FOMO is most often seen in social settings, where the person feels a certain level of social anxiety or general fear that you are missing out on some great event, experience, investment or all of the above.

When you couple that urgency of scarcity with an idea of what’s being missed out on, you can trigger a strong response in the consumer.

The research behind it

There’s a well-known experiment that discusses this type of scarcity and FOMO.

The first comes from an experiment by Worchel, Lee and Adewole, where they showed students similar cookies in two different jars. The students were asked to rate the value of the two jars of cookies.

Initially, both jars of cookies were full, but then one jar had 8 of its cookies removed. Scarcity was introduced.

That scarcity caused most of the students to choose the jar with only 2 cookies.

Use this in your email marketing campaigns

The most common way to use this in your email marketing campaigns is to emphasize the scarcity of something. Normally, this is done by making something limited or only available for a certain time.

One of Soundest’s customers, Runway Rouge, used this effectively in their email campaign below.

Another great way to use both scarcity and FOMO is to combine urgency with popularity.

When Mailbox released their iPhone app in 2013, they had users signing up for the beta version. When they successfully signed up, they got a notice showing how many had signed up before them and how many were after them.

MAILBOX USED THIS PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENON FOR THE RELEASE OF THEIR APP. IMAGE SOURCE

You can try something similar in your email marketing to really boost the excitement, pressure and conversions.

2. Reciprocity

Reciprocity is a general psychological aspect that describes the way people behave when they receive a gift from someone. Usually, they feel like they need to repay that person with a gift of similar value.

For example, if you were at a Christmas party and someone handed you a nice gift, you would feel awkward or even anxious about not having a gift for that person in return. You may even go so far as buying a reciprocal gift soon after, or waiting until the next Christmas party to give your gift.

Sometimes, people reciprocate with a gift of even higher value.

The research behind it

One of the most famous studies about reciprocity involved the researcher Philip Kunz sending Christmas cards to 600 people. Out of the 600 people, almost 35% sent a Christmas card back to Kunz.

This is despite the fact that they had never even met.

Another study showed that if doctors received even a cheap, free sponsored lunch (like a few slices of pizza), they were more likely to prescribe the sponsor’s brand-name medication to their Medicare patients.

Use this in your email marketing campaigns

This is an amazing psychological method to tap into for your email marketing.

Basically, if you give something away for free, your subscribers will want to reciprocate that by buying your products.

There are many things you can give away for free for reciprocity to kick in. Of course, the higher the perceived value of the gift, the more likely the subscriber will be to buy something from you.

Another Soundest customer, Douglas Lithuania, provided their subscribers with a gift in one of their newsletters (dovana meaning ‘gift’).

3. The Foot in the Door Technique

The foot-in-the-door technique works by asking users to first agree to smaller requests. If they agree to the smaller requests, they are more likely to agree to the larger ones.

This can become a core part of the psychology of email marketing, as you have a lot of opportunity to do the ‘little asks’ of your subscribers. This makes it easier for them to agree to the ‘big asks,’ like clicking on a link or buying your products.

Get your customers to agree to a small ask and they’ll likely agree to a big ask

Your asks can come in any form, as long as the subscriber (or even blog reader or website visitor) voluntarily takes an action on your request.

The research behind it

One of the earliest studies that tested this foot-in-the-door technique is from 1966 by Freedman and Fraser.

In this experiment, the psychologists called housewives in California and asked them to discuss which household products they used.

After three days, they called again, this time asking if 5–6 men could visit their homes and check their cupboards and storage for 2 hours.

The women who were only given the small request (questions about household products) were more than twice as likely to agree to the big request (the physical inspection) than the housewives who were only given the big request.

Use this in your email marketing campaigns

The best way to use the foot-in-the-door technique is not when you’re sending your sales or promotions campaigns. Those are the big asks.

Instead, it’s when the user first signs up to your list.

You should be using the double opt-in process. After the user enters their email information on the form on your website, you should send them an email confirmation which asks them to click on a link to be confirmed.

This double opt-in acts like two small asks in rapid succession, as the user is first agreeing to sign up and then clicking the confirmation link.

HERE’S AN EXAMPLE OF HUBSPOT’S DOUBLE OPT-IN

The email confirmation link is the most important, as it prepares the way for your subscribers to be more open to future emails (and, most importantly, clicking on the CTA).

Soundest customers will be able to use the double opt-in option soon. See more on our What’s Next page.

For the remaining 4 psychology of email marketing tips, visit the original article on Soundest’s blog.

If you enjoyed this article, please recommend it to help others find it!

Bernard Meyer

Written by

Content and marketing guy over at https://www.omnisend.com - the ecommerce email marketing service that's simple and powerful to use

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