One of the top email marketing mistakes is trying to squeeze everything into one message, and welcome emails are no exception.

In that pivotal moment of first impression, the temptation is high to get the reader to do it all: here’s everything you need to know to get started, upgrade here, follow us on Facebook, check out these cool features, oh and welcome! That jumbling makes it hard for people to connect and find what’s actually motivating — relevance.

So when we saw how Clearbit was personalizing their welcome emails through Customer.io, we were thrilled and inspired.

Clearbit started out sending a general welcome to everyone who signed up, but the team realized that they weren’t dealing with a mass of generic John Does who all wanted the same thing. Instead, their customers had three distinct roles — engineering, marketing, and sales — with distinct needs.

What if they could trigger a welcome email with a message that was personalized based on the role? Fortunately, Clearbit is a business intelligence tool that enables you to look up and automatically pull in data about companies and people. The fact that they were already piping in their own Clearbit-enriched data into Customer.io made that personalized automation possible.

Here’s how they did it!

Work Your Segmentation Magic

At first, the Clearbit team created their engineering, marketing, and sales segments by hacking together a clever system of 70 conditions looking at keywords and patterns in the available enrichment data associated with an email address.

If you have a Github account associated with your email address, for example, you’d fall into the developer segment and get a message targeted towards engineers. Since the categorization rules looked at information like job title on LinkedIn and social media bios, I would fall into the marketing segment and get a welcome focused on marketer’s goals. Here’s a taste for what the conditions for building the sales segment looked like:

click to see the full list of conditions

Soon, the Clearbit team realized how useful this role categorization was. They could apply this system to make role and seniority attributions available through their own API, just like a Twitter handle or a company’s size. The keyword and pattern analysis happens behind the scenes and spits out a standardized attribute in the API response.

Now Clearbit’s role segments require just one condition to build in Customer.io. Here’s how that same sales role segment is built:

Get Super Relevant in Your Message

The early versions of Clearbit’s general welcome message that got sent to everyone are brief but not very specific. Here’s the first iteration of this general welcome:

While the email gets many welcoming elements right, the message provides an array of use cases and suggestions that don’t quite come together. This information mash-up makes it more difficult for an individual to figure out what Clearbit is and how it will help them do their job better. A marketer might not be capable of writing scripts while a developer probably has absolutely no interest in sales activities. “We were trying to cover all the bases with one email,” as Clearbit’s Matt Sornson told us.

In contrast, here’s the newer marketer-focused welcome, and you can tell from the first few lines who this message is for. This reader is going to become a “marketing god with Clearbit data”!

Click for the full email.

The Clearbit team noticed that frequently asked questions from marketing and sales folks centered around integrations and lookup tools. So the marketing welcome email features pre-built integrations with popular tools, shows a handy Google Sheets extension, and offers a way to get in touch for further assistance.

Let’s look at the engineering-focused welcome. This email is shorter and zeroes in on trying out a first API call and setting up an integration. Note the change in subject line too, from “Let’s get started!” to “Let’s build something!”

The Results

Upon receiving his welcome email, Matt Cox, an engineer on the Customer.io team who set up our own integration with Clearbit, felt the motivating power of relevance firsthand. He noted,

As a developer, getting an email that gave me links to the docs and the encouragement to build something cool was immediately useful and a breath of fresh air compared to other emails I’ve received. It was motivating to not have to dig through things to get what I needed.

Clearbit is seeing the positive impact as well. With most users coming in the door identified as developers, the emails are seeing these paid conversion rates: the marketing welcome converts at 7.3%; developer at 3.6%; and sales at 1.8%. Compared to those early, non-specific emails, Matt Sornson observes, “It’s clear that it makes a pretty big difference to be able to send those different emails.”

Now, you don’t need a Clearbit integration to start tailoring your own welcome messages. Maybe you’re receiving job role information as part of your sign-up flow, or you have data identifying which landing page or marketing campaign new users came in from, or you know what level plan people sign up for. The data you collect and insights you learn about your customers serve as valuable information for you to deliver better experiences and more effective messages to your users.

Gone are the days of grasping at straws in front of your audience. Instead of making tentative guesses like “if you’re a developer” or “if you’re on the Gold plan” and trying to cover all your bases with a well-meaning (but crazily optimistic) kitchen-sink approach — you can come up with a sharp, effective, and helpful welcome that sticks.

Do your customers fit into different personas? How do you personalize your approach! Our ears (well, eyes) are wide open in the comments.

Imagine you’re on your way to work and happen upon a pop-up coffee stand. They’re handing out free cups of coffee in exchange for feedback about the drink. There’s a table with the usual coffee-related complements like milk, cream, and sugar — but also some offbeat options like orange peel, sweet paprika, and anise.

Even if you have absolutely no interest in adding a dash of paprika to your coffee, the fashion in which those offbeat spices are presented — whether they’re in classy crystal spice containers or jagged-edged Styrofoam cups — will likely affect your enjoyment of your coffee.

That’s what researchers Marco Bertini, Elie Ofek, and Dan Ariely discovered when they ran this experiment at MIT. Ariely describes the results in his book, Predictably Irrational:

[T]he interesting thing was that when the odd condiments were offered in the fancy containers, the coffee drinkers were much more likely to tell us that they liked the coffee a lot, that they would be willing to pay well for it, and that they would recommend that we should start serving this new blend in the cafeteria. When the coffee ambience looked upscale, in other words, the coffee tasted upscale as well.

Whether you go for a fancy pour-over at a hipster cafe, the comforting contents of a hefty diner mug, or a skinny extra-hot caramel macchiato upside down venti at Starbucks — you probably have a strong preference about where you get your brew. How did that preference come to be? There’s a lot at work beyond the cut-and-dry calculation of quality and cost — a jumble of taste, memory, perception, feeling, and as this experiment shows, the design around your experience.

Ariely is a behavioral economist, which means he studies how psychological, emotional, and cognitive factors impact our motivation, decision-making, and behavior, or more simply put, why the heck we do what we do, in spite of all our diets and dreams. Of course, looking to fields like behavioral economics and psychology is nothing new in marketing — if anything, it’s part and parcel of the job — nor is it very surprising that aspects like presentation shapes behavior.

And yet.

I’ve been thinking a lot about email marketing goals, how we see much more handwringing over the short-term pursuit of opens and clicks versus the long-term pursuit of meaningfully understanding and impacting customer behavior.

Sometimes the nuggets of insight into human nature we get from fields like behavioral economics seem tailor-made to apply as email hacks and ploys — but in doing so, we might be missing the forest for the trees, customers for clicks. How are your email messages changing decisions beyond the click? How are they influencing broader customer perception, experience, and behavior?

Kristen Berman, a co-founder with Ariely, of Irrational Labs, reminds us that whatever our intentions, the way we communicate, operate, and build things affects what people do:

It is the person who designs the environment in which we live in who has the most influence on our decisions as opposed to the person who is actually making the decision.

How you communicate with your users is part of their environment. You’re playing a role in designing their decisions beyond the issue of whether they clicked on a link or not. You see, email plays especially well as an environmental element or a component of choice architecture. Because email tends to span a series of multiple interactions, serve as an extension of your product or offering, and feel personal and relevant, you can use it to design experiences.

Great experience design provides a notable competitive advantage. In the brick-and-mortar world, that may be the interior design and atmosphere of a space. The ambience that Starbucks deliberately created in their stores, for example, played a vital role in their success. The roasty aroma of fresh ground beans, the earthy colors and smooth music, and menu of fancy Italian-sounding drink names at a time when third places were few and third-wave coffee yet to bloom established Starbucks’s position as a go-to spot. “I’ve always loved the design aspect of Starbucks,” chairman and CEO Howard Schultz writes in his memoir Pour Your Heart Into It. “I consider graphics and store design to be a differentiating factor, a way to show our customers that Starbucks is one step ahead.”

Many internet businesses (that aren’t e-commerce) put off or don’t put resources into user communication, beyond occasional announcements and promotions. But what’s going to stand out and keep you steps ahead in this software-eating age is people’s experiences in the environment you create for them — and a core part of that is how you communicate with them.

To me, the most significant takeaway from behavioral economics that we can apply to marketing, and email in particular, is to push to be much more creative, empathetic, and intentional when it comes to people’s experiences. Are we designing decisions, architecting choices, building value, and promoting people’s experiences or merely promoting?

Do you have any email success metrics beyond opens and clicks? Share with us in the comments!

Stop obsessing over the size of your email lists. It’s distracting you from the real work of quality growth — of building audiences, developing customers, and nurturing relationships.

When you’re consumed by list growth, your job is merely about the numbers rolling in, contained to the hunt and capture of one more email address. Great email marketing is not so simplistic or shallow.

That’s not to disregard the fact that businesses have to make money. But there are deeper values at stake when it comes to how you email. As Justine Jordan, Litmus’s VP of Marketing, told us:

Email is the ultimate way for a marketer to connect with their audience. Too often what happens is marketers just think about it as a high ROI channel.

That opinion leads us down a path of bad behavior, where we look at email like it only has capabilities to make our companies money. Often that comes in the form of shoving promotions, discounts, and deals down people’s throats.

Every email is not a sale, though your inbox may show otherwise. Let’s look at what it means to turn your focus from lists to the people behind those rows of email addresses.

Tipping the Odds of Success in Your Favor

Email list size obsession is one symptom of top-of-funnel fixation, which relies on churning through a bunch of people to extrude as many customers as possible. Here’s how MailChimp CEO Ben Chestnut describes that process:

The idea is that you need a ton of website visitors, then some of them become leads, and then after you do something (the usual recommendation is to bombard the leads with marketing automation) they relent and pay you money, thus becoming a “customer.”

That kind of list-grinding means that “a lead who’s not on the path to becoming a customer is a distraction,” as Ezra Fisher from Wistia observes. Then, having spent all your attention and effort to entice, the very people whom you’ve worked so hard to get in the door are often abandoned, left to their own devices or bombarded with irrelevant messages. What results is a Sisyphean task of constantly filling up a leaky funnel instead of building momentum with audiences, customers, and fans.

What if you flip the funnel over to focus on customers — or go beyond funnel-based thinking, as Wistia does, to focus on audience? These approaches can make your emails much more effective and powerful.

Messages don’t resonate when you have to clamor for attention in a large, indiscriminate crowd that keeps turning over. When it comes to email, the shouting-on-a-soapbox approach doesn’t make sense to connect on a personal level.

Instead, your probability of success is much higher with specificity and relevance — a personalized approach, carried out over time. When you do the hard work of building and sustaining an audience, your messages go out to people willing to actually listen.

A strategy built on ongoing and relevant communication also transforms every email from a do-or-die chance to make a sale into a building block. As Gary Vaynerchuk observes that, “Email is all about delivering on promises.” Whether you simply have a simple newsletter or you’re a big company with a product — getting an email address is just the beginning.

The Obvious Choice Isn’t Always a Win

Email marketing isn’t just about subscriptions and signups then, but delivering on promises and following through. The marketing and growth teams at Pinterest discovered firsthand how that long-term thinking dims as you get preoccupied with the usual opens and clicks.

For instance, their “Send a Pin” notification (sent when someone wants to share a pin with you) could have been a simple message that made you click through to find out what the pin was. There would be boosts in clicks and traffic to Pinterest, which sounds great and looks like growth. “If we only looked at email clicks rates, it was an obvious choice: make people come to Pinterest and see the message,” marketer Annie Katrina Lee explains.

Pinterest’s old Share a Pin notification

Annie clarifies how what was obvious wasn’t right: “what we didn’t consider was how much we’d annoy Pinners by adding an additional click to see content they’re interested in.” When they looked at what was actually happening, they saw that these emails increased the recipients’ engagement by 1-2%.

The team ended up deciding to show both message and pin in the email itself. Lee explains the math:

We opted for our long-term gain (building trust with Pinners) vs. short-term gain (more clicks to Pinterest from this specific email), because we could always find ways to drive more clicks from other growth hacks, but it would be difficult to scalably build trust once it’s gone.

Pinterest’s new Share a Pin notification

Once you stop seeing email as a button to push every time you want to squeeze out some more money, more hits, more clicks, more traffic — your goals become clearer and more meaningful and your emails, more helpful and valuable.

Choose Your Battles, and Scale Trust

Your job is to scale trust, which can seem like an oxymoron of a task. Here’s Annie Katrina Lee again on that conflict:

I hear a lot of horror stories about growth teams hacking new ideas to achieve “hockey stick” growth, but lose brand equity in the process. At Pinterest, we value both our growth rate (how quickly we’re growing) and our brand reputation (how people perceive and feel about us). These goals tend to be at odds with each other, and over time, we’ve learned how to pick and choose our battles wisely.

In marketing, that battle seems constant as you balance your priorities as a business (“our growth rate”) and the customers you serve (“how they perceive and feel about us”). What’s so helpful about the principle of scaling trust is that it steers you to consider whether and how you’re providing value for your customer.

Scaling trust requires being able to deliver positive experiences and build confidence in lots and lots of people. Luckily, this is email’s sweet spot as a channel. There are two things you need to scale trust as an email marketer for web and mobile businesses that I find often overlooked:

• behavioral data: Modern email marketing draws on real-time behavioral data to segment beyond simple demographics to automate and deliver super-relevant, personalized experiences at scale. Tools like Customer.io give marketers much more access and control to harness such data than was ever possible.
• thoughtful strategy: Automation and data are nothing without humans understanding how to put it all together. When you’re working towards the long-term with flipped funnels and audience focus, “just sending out another email” can’t be your go-to move. Now spending time chasing email opens and clicks, or seeking that best send time or subject line, don’t always make sense. Anyone can send emails; really understanding why and how to send emails is the key.

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It’s not that you shouldn’t care about expanding your connections and audience — but the persistent fixation on list growth feeds the underestimation of what “good email marketing” looks like.

There’s so much that’s challenging, interesting, rewarding, and valuable about email marketing that it’s a shame to reduce that hard work to a few vanity metrics like clicks, traffic, and list size.

Every email is an opportunity to connect with real people, improve their experience and provide value, have a conversation, and make a meaningful difference in how they understand and view your brand. That’s much harder to measure, but more vital in the long run.

How do you use email to scale trust? Share with us in the comments!

How did email personalization become synonymous with merging in a name field? “Hello FIRSTNAME” isn’t what makes people run to grab their credit cards.

The power of personalization is no secret. It generates compelling emotions that persuade, support, and connect. Marketers keep resolving to prioritize personalization, especially as we face dwindling attention spans and intensifying readiness to hit unsubscribe.

When you hear “personalization,” you expect a message that’s relevant to you. Instead, the term often describes the simplistic use of static identity attributes, like popping a first name into a subject line.

Most marketers rely on demographic and geographic data. But a person is (thankfully) more than the sum of their demographic parts.

Marketing personalization comes to life when you use real-time behavioral data. Yet marketers still have a long way to go, and the proof is in your inbox. Only a third of consumers feel like they’re getting personalized experiences, cites one recent Forrester study. What’s at stake, as VB Insights analyst Andrew Jones lays out, is that: “Without advancing to more mature efforts, most marketers are leaving money on the table.”

Going Beyond Name Personalization

A great gift for a friend isn’t a shirt with their name literally on it. It’s a thoughtful act, based on what you know about the recipient that you’ve learned from your relationship. And that’s a great starting point for your emails too.

Marketing personalization is also powered by purpose. As John Bononi, growth director at Litmus, explains:

Personalization is about so much more than a [first_name]. It’s about understanding what drives a person’s decision making process, where they are in that process, and placing all of it within the context of their specific challenges.

Your email campaigns help people make progress towards their goals (that relate to your business) by meeting their individual needs. Mutual success requires more than a mail merge. It takes effort, analysis, and contextual knowledge.

While short-term goals are focused on persuasion and conversion, more fundamentally, your job as a marketer is to develop good relationships. And whether we’re talking about a user interacting with a digital product or making a new friend — relationships emerge from conversation and interaction. You pay attention to cues and listen to the other person to know what to say next.

Smart marketers know that meaningful personalization relies on contextual and relational understanding, not short-term tricks like using names and pretending messages were sent from the CEO’s iPhone.

The Magic of Modern Email Personalization

Modern email marketing draws on real-time behavioral data to deliver personalized experiences at scale. Modern email personalization is Netflix sending customers recommendations to kick off another binge-watching session — or Buffer sending me an email when my Twitter queue has run out of posts.

You can send much more effective, personalized messages when you’re able to respond to what’s actually happening instead of taking shots in the half-dark or driving yourself crazy with complicated sequences based on a chain of email open and click interactions. That’s powerful when you have to contend with human nature. People don’t behave in straight lines, from point A to B to C. We can’t even do stuff we already want to (hello, New Year’s resolutions…).

Then why are marketers who say they prioritize personalization taking so long to make use of behavioral data? There’s been a lack of access to that data and lack of knowledge that newer technology and tools have made that access way easier. There’s still a huge disconnect between practice and possibility.

Marketers have had to juggle a dizzying array of decentralized, siloed, and inadequate data sources. They deal with user data buried in application code and CRM tools that store limited types of data that’s focused around the sales funnel. They have to handle batched updates, syncing problems, and a terrifying collection of lists. It’s not so surprising then, that personalization takes a backseat.

Many businesses are still stuck in the past, focusing on simplistic personalization and marketing emails that focus on top-of-funnel acquisition and lead generation (where there’s less data to work with, anyway). Jones from VB Insights concludes: “Many marketers simply aren’t aware of the scope of possibilities.”

These days, there are powerful customer engagement tools (like Journeys) that surface primary user data for marketers to put into service through integrations and data hubs like Data Pipelines. Now, you can control and automate onboarding messages based on what people have actually done, get super-targeted with offers and content based on combinations of behavior and user attributes, and fine-tune your tactics for nurturing, converting, retaining, and delivering value to your customers.

Tips for Behavioral Marketing Emails

Got behavioral data superpowers? Keep these 3 guiding principles in mind when creating personalized email experiences:

1. Get smart with your segmentation.

Personalization is the opposite of getting up on a soapbox and shouting at whoever is around. It’s about designing a segment of recipients who are most likely to need and welcome your message. And when you work with behavioral data, you’re not working with static lists but real-time, fluid groupings of people that reflect reality. (Head here for some smart segmentation inspiration).

2. Root your messages in purpose.

Focus on helping people decide what to do next and demonstrating your brand’s value. These are just a few behavioral starting points for tailoring your emails and some examples:

• Abandonment and inactivity: inactivity, app or browse abandonment, funnel drop-offs

timeshel re-engages you after downloading their mobile app

• Key features that haven’t been activated
• Haven’t fully set up, activated, or onboarded
• Haven’t installed/used desktop or mobile versions or browser extensions

CloudApp reminds you to install the app

• Subscription and membership renewals
• Upgrades, upsells and rewards
• Nearing quota limits: time, space, etc.

Woopra gives you a heads up if you’re nearing your quota

• Referrals and Invitations
• Milestones and accomplishments
• Reports, digests, wrap-ups to learn about self and activity

3. Personalization is in the details.

Personalization should feel, well, personal, not so very different from getting an email from someone you know. Spend time on your words and tone and voice to escape lazy business-speak, consider going minimal on the design (many email clients turn off images by default).

Bonus tip: Use Fallbacks

If you’re using tags and templating to include first names, have a fallback to avoid those “HI NONAME” situations. Here’s an example of how I handle this for our weekly newsletter:

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Scaling personalization may seem like a contradiction — but that’s exactly the struggle. With great user growth comes increasing challenges to communicate with everyone one-on-one in a way that’s helpful and efficient.

Automating messages based on behavior works when you employ real-time data, have helpful tools to harness that data, and don’t forget the very human and hard work of deciding how to program it all.

Marketing is like gardening or farming. Whether it’s leads, new users, or paying customers — your job is to nurture newbies to develop into great big fans. Your job is to cultivate.

It’s fitting that green-thumb marketers turn to drip campaigns, which relates back to the agricultural practice of drip irrigation. As Paul McFedries explains in Word Spy:

The phrase drip marketing may sound as though it’s based on the practice of water torture, but it actually comes from the phrase drip irrigation. This is an agriculture/gardening technique in which small amounts of water are fed to plants over long periods of time.

The concept is simple: provide value and care over time to grow happy customers. The problem is that marketers aren’t using email to its full potential to do so.

Drip marketing has been around a long time in various channels, but it gets messy when it comes to email. You’ll hear these terms used interchangeably — drip emails, automated emails, triggered emails, lifecycle emails, behavioral emails, autoresponders — causing confusion and misunderstanding.

We wanted to shed some light on what modern-day, sophisticated drip emails do and how to put them to work for you.

Drip Emails Have Evolved Beyond Timed Autoresponses

A drip email campaign is an automated sequence of emails, triggered by an individual’s action.

The old drip email system is simple and reflexive, kicking off when someone signs up for something like creating an account, subscribing to a website or email course, or making a purchase.

The problem with this dated system of drip emails is that they’re dumb to any context besides a pre-set timetable. Like a configuration of falling dominoes, once these emails start, they’ll keep hitting your inbox in a predetermined order and schedule until they run out, start a subsequent series, or you unsubscribe. That type of relentless conveyer-belt delivery leads one to muse, as McFedries does, that “Perhaps it is a form of torture, after all.”

In contrast, modern drip emails are triggered by people’s behavior. And by behavior, I’m not talking about email opens and clicks, like this:

I’m talking about user behavior — the very same behavioral data that you’re probably tracking with analytics tools. What’s so powerful about behavior? Consider one automated, behavioral email — the transactional email.

Transactional emails get much higher engagement rates than other types of email — and it makes total sense why.

Experian’s Transactional Email Report

People expect to trigger such messages with certain actions, like making a purchase. You’d even get nervous if you booked an expensive flight but never got a confirmation email. In many ways, transactional emails are the ideal email, hitting all three requirements of revelance: right message, right person, right time.

When drip emails are triggered by people’s behavior on your site or app — rather than time or email opens — you’re starting out closer to that ideal because they’re responding to individual situations. Instead of a relentless, fixed sequences of messages, every person gets an email experience that’s customized to their needs.

Behavioral Drip Emails Make Your Job Easier

It’s an Email 101 rule that every email has a clear purpose. With behavioral drip emails, that purpose becomes much easier to work towards. Instead of being dictated by a time table, messages are tied to actual goals to help people succeed and experience their aha moments.

It’s the striking difference between receiving an email about adding a picture to your social networking app profile because you haven’t uploaded one yet — and receiving that message just because it’s the 3rd drip in the campaign. “Oh, you put up a photo already? Shrug.” isn’t the experience that you’re shooting for.

With purpose in mind, you can hone in on specific conversions instead of sending a random series of “best practice” tips. Here’s a great example of a behavioral drip campaign from CloudApp, a tool that allows you to easily share screenshots and other types of files:

For people to get any value from CloudApp, they have to create their first “drop” or file to share. If you’re a new user and haven’t created your first drop, you’ll start receiving this email series, spread out over a month. As soon as you create your first drop, the series stops. Because it’s tied to whether you carry out the action or not, you might only get just 1 or 2 of these emails.

Sending behavioral drip messages is a smarter, more focused way of working in marketing and product. You’re more effective at helping people succeed while ultimately sending them less email, and you can measure real results rather than guessing from clicks and opens.

But only 20% of marketers are using behavioral emails, according to Ecoconsultancy’s 2015 Email Marketing Census. There’s a lot of catching up to do!

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Farmers have to pay attention to what they’re growing and in what conditions and context. They take note of the weather, the seasons, the bugs, the quantity of sun and quality of soil, and gauge their progress by how their crops are thriving. And even the humblest houseplant-keeper learns that succulents won’t live if you water them just the same as your spider plant.

Any marketer of a product or service with real users knows that people neither act in the same way or in ways that you expect. It makes little sense, then, to send everyone the same series of messages and just hope for the best.

Just because you’re using automation doesn’t mean that interactions have to be unthinking or superficial. When you use behavioral drip emails, treating email as part of the user experience and responding to how users are interacting with you, you’re paying attention to growth conditions and listening to real people. That’s smart, modern marketing.

Are you using behavioral drip emails in your marketing or not? Share your experience with us in the comments!

If you turn your Econ 101 textbook to the first page, you’ll find a definition of homo economicus: the economic man. It’s an old-school way to understand why people make the choices they do. This character is rational, self-interested, and thinks purely in terms of maximizing his utility. Nothing will persuade him except his own economic gain.

And as any marketer knows, that’s a totally unrealistic model.

Sure, we all value utility and economic gain, but we also chase rainbows, windmills, waterfalls, and that last cookie in the jar. Assuming that we’re 100% rational and self-interested is a myopic view of what actually motivates people. If your email marketing campaign is governed by this principle, you’re operating from an expired field guide.

You need to bring more to the table than a good product or a good deal. You need to persuade people to come and stay at your table in the first place.

What follows is our collection of 5 motivational principles to help make you a powerful communicator, no matter what message you’re trying to get across. We’ll dive into why these principles are effective and explore lots of ways you can apply them in your emails.

1. Use Social Validation to Nudge Consumer Behavior

The “Tupperware party” entered the American vernacular in the 1950s. The idea was simple: instead of hiring strangers to sell kitchen goods, the company offered incentives encouraging housewives to become retailers. Women invited their friends and neighbors into their living rooms to drink tea, eat cake, and talk Tupperware.

Sales skyrocketed.

In 1990, researchers at the University of Chicago studied this technique and discovered what the Tupperware Corporation had put into practice so many decades ago: we’re hugely influenced by other people — especially people we know and trust. In fact, liking the hostess of the party influenced women’s decision to buy twice as much as their opinion of Tupperware’s product.

This principle, of course, extends far beyond Tupperware. When we’re uncertain of what to do—whether it’s how to spend our money or how to act — we look to our friends’ and neighbors’ example. Their actions greatly affect our own, whether we assist a choking victim in a restaurant, whether we pay our taxes in full, whether teens shoplift, and whether we recycle.

Making a decision can take a great deal of cognitive effort, so our brains are constantly looking for shortcuts. Social proof, or social validation, is your brain’s tried-and-true shortcut, one that’s increasingly handy now that the internet seems to offer infinite choice.

Show that Friends Are Doing It

Many companies successfully leverage social validation in their emails. This email from Foursquare brings customers back into their app by telling them what their friends have been up to. The subject line is “Save these 4 spots that Nikki, Alisha, and janelle recommended in New York.” We’re all on a first-name basis here.

And the social validation doesn’t stop there. The email has two sections: one listing restaurants that are trending this month generally, and one for places recommended by people you follow. Dividing the information this way provides a lot of value to customers. It lets them see what’s popular globally and what’s trending within their friend group, giving you two lenses to see what’s cool.

What’s more, every review in the email is accompanied by someone’s name and picture, letting you know that these are real people, not computers. That small bit of social validation introduces a human element into restaurant ratings and reviews, and makes this email something worth clicking on.

Authority Gives Your Argument Gravitas

Friends are powerful influencers because we trust them. Likewise, authority figures (whether it’s a celebrity, a politician, or a powerful organization) are strong influencers, because we’re more likely to trust them.

Amazon might already sound like an authority. But even the behemoth online retailer needed to call in the entertainment industry’s big guns when marketing its latest foray: TV production. When Amazon first started making original series, people raised their eyebrows. Sure, they can sell stuff, but what makes them a credible creative force and television studio?

Amazon had a lot to prove, even to their loyal customers. In this email, Amazon uses the authority of the Emmys to give credit to their TV studio’s show Transparent. The subject line doesn’t explicitly sell readers anything, it’s just an announcement: “‘Transparent’ Wins 5 Emmy® Awards.” The implication is that if the Television Academy likes the show, you should too — and that’s the tack Amazon ends up taking in the body (and preheader) of the email.

2. Apply The Scarcity Heuristic to Boost Your Product’s Value

Aristotle’s point that “What is rare is a greater good than what is plentiful” is something philosophers and psychologists agree upon. When a resource is scarce, we value it more — whether that resource is precious metal or even cookies.

In one study, researchers examined how much people valued a crowd-pleasing dessert: chocolate chip cookies. When participants saw a jar of 10 cookies swapped out for a jar with 2 cookies, they rated them as more desirable to eat, more attractive, and would pay a higher sticker price at the supermarket … despite the fact that they were all from identical Nabisco packages.

Note how the only difference was the consumer’s perception of how many cookies were available. This makes it an easy tool to integrate into your email marketing campaigns, as even hinting that something is scarce can be enough to motivate.

Limited Batch Offers

Let’s say your products really are scarce — you only have a 100 gourmet snack boxes in stock, or there’s a limited amount of tickets you can sell to a concert before violating fire codes. Use your emails to remind customers of this scarcity! The internet makes it seem like there’s an abundance of everything and an infinity of options.

Often, this blinding amount of choice inhibits customers’ resolution to buy. Rather than settle for something they just think they’ll like, they want to make sure they’re getting the best possible deal or the best quality product.

So what’s a marketer to do? Motivate customers to buy now because of the limited supply.

This email from Student Universe does exactly that. It advertises a discount of $100 on flights to New Zealand, but only to the first 150 people to take the deal. It’s not a huge price slash, given that flights are upwards of $1,000 from the United States. But by indicating that the deal is scarce can get people to commit to purchasing sooner.

Maybe they could find an even better deal if they kept looking, but a 10% discount looks pretty good when it’s scarce.

Artificial Scarcity

It’s also possible to create artificial scarcity — making something seem scarce when it’s actually not. It’s the reason Starbuck’s pumpkin spice latte is such a hit. The company created buzz around an allegedly seasonal drink that in reality isn’t even seasonal. The pumpkin spice latte could be available year-round, but Starbucks knows that creating artificial scarcity will stir more excitement about the product.

This email from KISSmetrics uses the same technique as Starbucks. They’re offering customers “seats” to a webinar, a scalable product that could theoretically go out to an unlimited number of people without costing them much. What’s more, the webinar is available as an online video on their website after it airs, which means people can access it any time they want. If you take a closer look, the product isn’t scarce at all.

But this email doesn’t mention any of that. Instead, it stresses that the product is limited. They use the language of a traditional venue — “seats” — making readers feel as though it’s a traditional, unscalable event, and the clear call-to-action tells customers they need to register now. Even though scarcity isn’t really there, the copy motivates people not just to act but also hurry if they want tickets.

3. Trigger An Emotional Response By Using the Framing Effect

We hate losing, and we love winning. But it turns out these powers don’t have equal pull. In fact, study after study reveals that our fear of losing overpowers our excitement at the prospect of gaining something.

Understanding how to frame a decision in terms of losses instead of gains is an effective tool in any marketer’s belt and can easily be incorporated into email campaigns. That’s because, as psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains:

Humans consider gains and losses psychologically rather than logically. A decision maker will select the option with the highest subjective value, whether or not that option provides the highest objective gain.

We process differently when something is framed in terms of loss.

Though the neurobiological mechanism isn’t understood, fMRIs of tests examining the “framing effect” reveal stimulation in the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with fear, emotion, and motivation. Stimulating the amygdala by triggering our fear of loss is an incredibly persuasive technique.

Show Customers What They’re Missing Out On

Swarm is an app that lets people share their locations with friends. It gamifies checking in, so that users gain points for places they go and things they do. Instead of focusing on all the winning users can do within their app, this email focuses on what you’re losing with the subject line: “You’re missing your friends’ check-ins.”

This email instigates FOMO (fear of missing out, which it even defines in the email) by showing what you’re missing by not using their app. Rather than inviting you to join in on the fun, Swarm applies the FOMO lens to play on that common fear that most people have experienced at one time or another: “Is everyone hanging out without me?”

What’s more, the email gives concrete numbers of just how many people are using the app. 706 new check-ins from 20 of your friends! Look at all those smiling faces in the photo — you’re not one of them! Swarm understands that we consider losses psychologically rather than logically — and this tactic makes particular sense for the company, given their app’s value fundamentally relies on the power of social networks.

Warn Customers Of Abandoned Shopping Carts

Abandoned shopping carts emails are another example of this powerful principle of the fear of loss. According to Salescycle, open rates for such emails are “well above 50% and more importantly, conversion rates around 30% across the board (that’s over 3x the rate of traditional marketing emails!).”

Dot & Bo’s cart abandonment campaigns resulted in a whopping 400% increase in revenue. They send one email 2 hours afterward abandonment, and then if you still haven’t completed the purchase, a second email, a day later, sometimes with extra incentives like free shipping. The emails assume you feel some ownership already. Here’s one that says that this white owl lamp is practically mine and it’s just waiting for me. If I don’t take action, I’ll lose it.

4. Cement Your Relationship With the Commitment Principle

When we make commitments to do something (rather than having them imposed upon us), we’re more likely to carry them out. Your copy, therefore, can be more persuasive if you emphasize that there’s a choice in the matter.

Restaurant owners across the nation are plagued by a common problem: no-shows. By holding seats for customers who never turn up, they lose a great deal of revenue. Efforts attempting to staunch the loss, like demanding a credit card to put on file as a precaution, leave customers angry and even offended.

But Gordon Sinclair, proprietor of Gordon’s restaurant in Chicago found a way to change his no-show rate from 30% to 10% without snubbing anyone. He instructed his receptionists to stop suggesting, “Please call us if you change your plans.” Instead they were to ask, “Will you call us if you change your plans?” — and then wait for a response.

By asking for an answer — a firm, specific “yes” or “no” from the customer, the person making the reservation made a commitment. Researchers who looked at Sinclair’s policy shift concluded that by getting a committed response, customers felt a greater stake in the outcome.

How do you apply this psychological principle to your email marketing?

Emphasize the Customer’s Agency

One way is to emphasize a customer’s agency. Remind the customer of the commitment they previously made, no matter how small it was. For example, in upsell or cross-sell emails, a simple “thank you for choosing us” is a simple prompt of the commitment they’d made in the past.

This email from Spotify reminds users why they’re receiving this update: “You are receiving this message because you are following this playlist.” Because users elected to receive this email, they’re more likely to follow through on their commitment to engage. In Spotify’s case, users might be more likely to actually click through on the email and listen to the new song, instead of ignoring it or even reporting the message as spam and impacting your deliverability.

It’s why this type of explainer blurb is an email marketing best practice. Reminding users that this email isn’t spam but something they explicitly opted into helps them feel in control and build a sense of trust with you.

5. Get Your Foot in the Door With the Rule of Reciprocity

Reciprocity is a norm that exists across cultures and borders. What’s particularly interesting to marketers is that the rule of reciprocity stipulates that any unexpected gift — no matter how small — still registers with us. It’s why smiling waitresses get up to twice as many tips.

One informative study looked at the payoff of a small gift in the form of a can of Coke. A vendor named Joe asked people to purchase raffle tickets. He gave some of them a soda, just as a favor. When Joe offered people a Coke, they bought twice as many raffle tickets. By creating a small sense of indebtedness, his gift paid dividends of 500%.

Email marketers are perfectly poised to harness the reciprocity principle.

Give A Little, Get A little

We ask a lot from customers. We ask for their attention, for their business, for their “likes” on Facebook. But there’s one thing we ask for that’s notoriously hard to get: the customer survey response. Surveys provide the feedback necessary to give customers a better product or user experience. And they only take a minute. It’s a win-win, right? So why do so many of them go unanswered?

Because the email requesting survey responses don’t motivate people. The video hosting platform Wistia turned the tables by giving a little gift along with their request.

Their gift, fittingly, was a video — a video of the whole team doing the Hustle. It was goofy and fun to produce, sure, but it also got responses. 2,400 people played the video, and they got about 78% engagement. Pretty good stuff. What’s more: over 1,000 people filled out the survey. That’s almost 50% of the people that watched the video. It was enough to get their foot in the door. And it really worked.

Giving customers something to smile about was enough to motivate them to fill out the survey.

A Little Extra: How to Compete With Attention Spans

Why do these little persuasive tricks work? What Wistia, Spotify, KISSmetrics, and other companies understand is that they’re emailing real people — people who didn’t necessarily want to take the time out of their day to fill out their survey, or check out their product, or spend time looking at their webinar. That’s a huge barrier.

Chris Savage, Wistia’s CEO, understands that today’s marketers are facing a huge challenge: shrinking attention spans. He noted, “attention has become a scarce resource. So it’s on us to figure out how we get attention—and when we do get it, how do we keep it.”

Chris’s answer: Get creative. But as a lot of brands have noticed, creative, out-of-the box thinking doesn’t feel scalable when you’re a big company. “It feels a lot harder to take creative risks when you’re bigger.”

But it shouldn’t. The key to battling attention spans is not just to get creative, Chris argues, but to root your creativity in something real, like data or behavioral psychology. Wistia’s survey video worked because it was creative and it understood a fundamental principle about motivation. Your emails need to do the same.

Hundreds of billions of emails are sent every day. While this may seem like a barrier for email marketers, it’s actually an opportunity.

A chunk of all these emails are going to be lazy emails—the ones that see their customers as simply as a rational economic being and not a human. They’ll rely on their awesomesauce deal or cool features to demand customers’ attention, time, and money. Their campaigns won’t be creative, they won’t be persuasive, and they won’t be rooted in motivational principles. And they won’t get results.

Set yourself apart by understanding the humans in front of their inbox.

Have you used any persuasion principles in your emails? Share with us in the comments!

image adapted from MoonSprocket via DeviantArt

The webinar is the marketer’s party. Okay, these learning and lead-generation gatherings probably aren’t as fun without the punch bowl and perfect playlist — but at the planning stages, there’s the same fear. What if nobody shows up?

For webinars (and, presumably, parties) — it all comes down to the invitation.

Email is simply the most effective channel for promoting webinars. 2012 data from BrightTALK show 58-64% of people attending thanks to email and direct invitations. The 2013 ON24 Webinar Benchmark Report states that 80% of registrations come from a combination of email and site promotions.

Your webinar invitations also deserve their own emails. Justine Jordan, VP of Marketing at Litmus, advises that you go beyond tacking on promotional mentions on regularly scheduled marketing messages:

[S]end a stand-alone email! We used to send newsletters with webinar registration links inside, but have found that sending dedicated emails for each webinar results in many more registrations.

Georgiana Laudi, VP of Marketing at Unbounce, also reports: “70% of all our webinar registrations come via our invitation emails.” For our own upcoming welcome email webinar, we can thank our dedicated invitation emails for 76% of registrants so far.

That’s all to say — your invitation emails are vital to a successful webinar! Let’s look at how to make them super effective to bring more people to your web party.

The Essential Ingredients for the Webinar Invitation

Webinar invitation email are all about making it easy for people to say yes and see what the value is for them. Here are all the ingredients you need:

• WHAT: Webinar title
• WHEN: Date and time of the webinar
• WHO: Introduce the people presenting, especially if there’s a guest
• HOW: Calls to action to register (buttons, links, etc.)
• WHY: What’s in it for the reader? What problem will you help them solve?
• WHAT: What will people learn? What should they expect from the presentation?
• CARE: The invitation is an early exercise in being a great and empathetic host. Make it easy to sign up. Address blockers by informing folks whether the recording will be available if you can’t attend the live event. Set expectations by being clear about any Q&As.

Here’s an example from Litmus of all those elements at work:

7 Tips to Optimize Your Webinar Invitations

Now let’s explore some tips to make those ingredients shine.

1. Have Time Zone Empathy

The challenge of coordinating any type of meeting online, whether it’s an interview, chat, or your amazing webinar, is getting timezones correct. You’ve probably put thought into scheduling your webinar at a time that makes sense for your audience — but don’t make your readers have to do timezone math (which, for some reason, is always more complicated than regular math).

Most people attempt to account for this by including 2-3 timezones in their invite. Some even go so far as to provide a link to a timezone converter. But the best treatment of timezones in webinars invitations that I’ve seen come from Litmus and Skillcrush.

Skillcrush provides a handy “Convert to your timezone!” link, which sends you straight to a page with the correct conversion. You can use timeanddate.com’s handy Event Time Announcer to set up this type of link for your own invitations.

Similarly, Litmus provides a helpful “View in your timezone” link — which leads you to a Permatime page that shows you the date and time in your local zone (according to your computer settings). With Permatime, you can also add a label and link to your event:

Update: Permatime is no longer around, but you can check out Every Timezone

2. State the Problem

Spelling out the problem or challenge is an effective tactic for two reasons. It forces you to take on the perspective of your audience — and provides a great lead-in to your description of what people can take away from the presentation if they sign up. That “you have this problem” plus the “we help you solve it” one-two punch ultimately helps to craft a compelling pitch.

Email on Acid promises to solve a common problem that haunts most email marketers: the Great Fear of Hitting Send. This approach results in much more compelling copy, like the call-to-action to “eliminate that awful pit in your stomach,” than something blah like “learn the best practices of email deliverability”

Here’s a great example from Unbounce that also pinpoints a problem that causes doubts and insecurity:

The pain of getting copy to pop is real. Unbounce taps into that and promises to deliver “a foolproof system for writing targeted, persuasive copy for all your landing pages—without losing your mind.” Who wouldn’t want that!

That leads perfectly into the 4 concrete lessons that you’ll take away from attending the webinar.

3. Make a personal connection.

The fact that you’re writing as a business or professional is never a reason to sound like you’re filling out a corporate fill-in-the-blanks form. Even if there’s a bit of a formula to webinar invitations, what will make your message compelling and convincing is your ability to connect as people.

# Use images of people

Simply by providing photos of the people involved in a webinar, Bit.ly makes their invitation more appealing and warm. The way they’ve formatted their email is also helpful — everything you need to know at a glance, right at the start. Invitation messages are no occasion to bury the lede.

Wistia’s screenshot of a video with Kristen not only shows a human face behind the upcoming webinar but it’s also a simple, inviting way for people to find out more about the event. You could create one or two teaser videos to capture interest and strengthen people’s motivation to actually attend the webinar live.

# Talk like a real, live person

Making a personal connection can be accomplished simply with tone and style. Joanna Wiebe is one of the best copywriters out there — and of course her webinar invitation doesn’t disappoint.

In a matter of 10 lines or so, she gets across everything you need to know, from identifying the existing challenge, the promise of a solution, and details. This checks off all the webinar invitation elements, and it’s done in a succinct, totally relatable way, signing off with a casual, personable “See you there, jo”

# Send a simply-formatted, unbranded message

Hana Abaza, VP of Marketing at Uberflip, takes the personal approach with this text-focused, simply-formatted email. No logos, no images — just a message written as if she wrote it to you in her Gmail account. The “What are you doing this week?” line is an interesting change-up from the usual announcement of the webinar in the subject.

4. Tap into FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)

While persuasion principles are handy in marketing your webinar overall, the scarcity principle is especially fitting to add motivation oomph to emails. Scarcity is persuasive because people tend to want what they can’t have. You’ll find examples of this when you see language expressing a scarcity of time or space — “now”, “limited seats”, “special invitation”, “time’s running out”, etc.

Here’s an invite from Iris Shoor at Startup Moon that applies the scarcity principle 4 times in her copy. Can you identify them all?

1. “special invite for you”
2. “exclusive webinar”
3. “Spots are limited.”
4. “We want to bring you more than what you can find on Google.” Promising exclusive knowledge in your webinar is a smart touch.

5. Target your invitations

Target your webinar invitations at specific segments of your userbase and email lists. It’s the golden rule of email at work — relevance, first — and your metrics will improve across the board. Not only will have a better chance of successful conversions (webinar registrations), you’ll reduce needless unsubscribes and damaging spam reports.

Check out this webinar invitation email from Mention:

While it might not look very different from the other emails in this post, this invitation was specifically sent to Mention users who work in marketing. By targeting an audience who’s more likely to be interested in this webinar’s subject — conversion rate optimization and growth — Mention is increasing their chances of success to drive registrations without annoying the rest of their userbase.

Here are some additional ideas for segments you can target:

• engaged newsletter readers
• someone who downloaded an ebook or resource recently
• recent signups to your product
• a specific segment of your userbase
• attributes like job role or signup source

We took a page from 15Five’s winback email strategy to send out webinar invites to lapsed and inactive Customer.io account-holders. That segmentation resulted in 76% of registrations so far.

6. Send a sequence of emails

Webinar email campaigns span more than the invitation itself. There are teasers, confirmation message with logistics and details, and follow-ups. But that doesn’t mean you should only send one dedicated invitation email.

Send at least two invitation emails, with the second one coming close to the date of the webinar. That way you can put the time scarcity persuasion principle to work — with phrases like “last chance”, “time’s running out”, “only X days/hours” to motivate in your copy and subject line. Multiple invitation emails are also a great opportunity to try different angles and tactics to entice readers.

7. Don’t forget the details.

Go straightforward with the subject line.

And for the from name, we recommend going with the familiar and following whatever pattern your recipients are used to. Just make sure not to overlook the “from name” detail — you might end up with something by mistake like “webinars”.

Of course, at the end of the day, testing is the best way to see what works. (Joanna has some great insight and advice on the from-name and subject line.)

Lastly, I thought I’d share some links to resources on holding webinars I found particularly helpful.

• Unbounce’s The Smart Marketer’s Guide to Webinar Marketing
• Unbounce also has a great blog post about planning webinars that pre-dates the more comprehensive guide.
• Zapier’s How to Create a High-Converting Webinar Landing Page Without Writing Any Code
• Mention’s Everything You Need to Know About Running a Webinar (And Then Some)
• Copyhacker’s Are Webinars Part of Your Growth Hacking Plan This Year?

What are some winning touches or missteps you’ve seen in webinar invitations? We’d love to hear, so share in the comments!