“Because you’re worth it.”

This famous slogan by the cosmetic company L’Oréal’s uses one of the most powerful words in persuasive copywriting — “because.”

Humans crave reasons and resolutions. Ever since you are a small child, you want to know “why?” The master of persuasion, Robert Cialdini, explains why that basic desire drives action:

A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.

When you lose motivation with a task or job, you may find yourself asking “why am I even doing this?” in the first place. Reasons equal motivation, including motivation to click through, reply, comply with your request, or even do you a favor.

So are you making the most out of the power of “because” in your emails?

The Surprising Power of “Because”

People aren’t even choosy about their rationales for behavior, as Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer found in a famous 1978 study.

Langer and her colleagues wanted to see whether people would let someone skip ahead of them in line at a busy library copy machine. They asked people three request variations. Take a look at the success — or conversion — rate for each question:

• Excuse me. I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine? — 60%
• Excuse me. I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? — 93%
• Excuse me. I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush? — 94%

It makes sense that not providing a reason performed the worst — simply asking without a justification makes you look presumptuous. But surprisingly, giving the meaningless, redundant rationale of “I need to make copies” did nearly as well as a legitimate explanation. In this scenario, the mere existence of a rationale increased the likelihood of success by 55%.

Still — the power of “because” by itself has its limits. When the line interrupter announced that they needed to jump ahead to make 20 copies rather than 5, people became much more critical about the reason’s substance.

Compare:

• Excuse me. I have 20 pages. May I use the Xerox machine? — 24%
• Excuse me. I have 20 pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? —  24%
• Excuse me. I have 20 pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush? 42%

As Langer explains:

Once compliance with the request required a modicum of effort on the subject’s part, thoughtful responding seemed to take the place of mindlessness, and the reason now seemed to matter.

Almost any explanation motivates — but the bigger the ask, the more the quality of your reason matters.

Because Persuasion Requires a Bridge

So now you know that we, humans, will use almost any reason to justify our behavior — but that a quality reason is most compelling.

“Because” is the conjunction that connects your goal to the reader’s motivation, putting everyone on the same side. The takeaway here is not necessarily to go heavy on the word “because” in your copy as a quick-fix formula — but to carry out that connective reasoning that bridges the gap between intentions. Emails and calls to action fail to convert when they fail to take the reader’s perspective into consideration.

Your reader is the protagonist, the VIP, the star. L’Oréal’s enduring pitch isn’t that their cosmetics are worth it — it’s that their customers are awesome. Give reasons that resonate with readers so that they’ll follow your request and become loyal customers:

• because that’s the awesome type of person they want to be (appealing to self-expression needs)
• because it will help them accomplish their goals (appealing to functional needs)
• because it will be fun or enjoyable (appealing to aesthetic needs and the senses)

Despite being the participant of many-a-power-word list, “because” doesn’t seem very common in digital copywriting. Try testing using the word “because” in your emails and copy to motivate people to comply with your call to action.

example of a CTA from Copyhackers using “because”

Now let’s dig into some examples of how you can use the power of “because” in your emails:

Dot & Bo (limited time + incentive)

This cart abandonment email from Dot & Bo provides the good ol’ Cinderella rationale to act quickly — “because this code expires at midnight” within 2 weeks.

The limited time discount is not the only “because” factor in this email. The cute owl lamp is not a random product but something I left in my shopping cart before leaving the site. This customization based on my behavior makes the message feel relevant and that this call to action is for me rather than any ol’ Joe Schmoe.

ePantry (VIP treatment + incentive)

ePantry provides a subscription service for sustainable household products. Their brand revolves around their mission to prioritize customer happiness and, as a B corp, social and environmental good. This strong company identity and purpose provides many reasons for customers to bite.

This email with the subject line “We do things differently” is no exception.

This is a good example of the “because I have to make more copies” rationale. While I don’t doubt that ePantry believes its community members are the best, that reason is also not specific or compelling on its own. It works, given the company’s consistent mission and messaging, the sweetener incentive of free shipping, and the feeling of special treatment — a mix that has worked so successfully for companies like Zappos.

Stitchfix (testimonials, social proof)

Stitchfix offers affordable personal styling services for women. As part of the sign up process, you have to fill out a personal style profile to share your sense of taste, budget, size, and lifestyle. Instead of bugging me right away with a generic “please complete your profile” nudge, Stitchfix sent me 4 reasons to get moving from happy customers.

Your happiest customers have already found reasons that resonate — and they’ll probably say it best.

Unbounce (accomplish your goal + incentive)

In its newsletter, Unbounce sends updates on their newest, best content. In a smart move, the company also connects its content audience to its product by including a call to action in every postscript.

While there’s no explicit “because” statement — there’s a reason (Unbounce will help you solve the problem of creating marketing landing pages) that leads right up to the pitch to “try Unbounce today.” Notice how they follow through with what sounds like an incentive. “We’ll pay the first month for you” sounds like a more compelling reason to act than the usual “free trial” angle.

Don’t make an unjustified request that sounds like a presumptuous command or comes off as worthless noise. People like having reasons for what they do, and as one wise giant robot dinosaur says:

EVERYONE CARE ABOUT SELF FIRST. TAKE HINT. CARE ABOUT THEM FIRST TOO.

WHOLE POINT OF COMMUNICATE? THEM. WITHOUT A THEM THERE NO COMMUNICATE. IT JUST OTHER WORD END IN “ATE”.

For marketing emails — and any emails really — where you’re asking people to do something, give reasons. Because you’re worth it. Because awesome.

What’s your experience with conversion when using the word “because”? Share with us in the comments!

Photo: Olivier Jeannin/Flickr

“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

You might not realize it, but this famous quote from the Spanish swordsman in The Princess Bride has all the ingredients you need to make great welcome emails.

• Hello — the Greeting
• My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. — Who you are: a name and identifying information that provides the context (what you do, your interests, cares, and concerns) required to make a connection
• Prepare to die. — What comes next.

Let’s examine the 3 elements of the welcome email, go through some ideas for what to say, and see how to tie it all together (without threats of revenge).

1. The Greeting (and gratitude)

The greeting is quick moment simply to say “hi” and “thanks.”

This is the one spot governed by convention, so don’t think too hard about the basic social act of acknowledging other human beings — “hello” or “welcome” will do just fine. Follow through with an indication of happiness or gratitude that someone expressed enough interest to grant you entrance into their inbox.

• Hi, nice/great/lovely to meet you, welcome, hey
• We’re happy, glad, excited, thrilled, delighted that you joined our app!
• Thanks for subscribing/signing up for our list!

Gain your advantage by breaking away from the generic. Add some specificity. Personalize using first names and other relevant details — and make the reader feel special or part of something larger than themselves.

• Thanks for joining our newsletter community of thousands of people who love email!
• It’s exciting that you’re one step closer to mastering how to play the ukulele!

2. Who are you (and why is that important)?

Now this is your big chance to stand out. Anyone can say “welcome” and “thank you.” It’s who you are and why you exist that makes you distinctive. Strangely, this is the one element that’s most often missing in welcome emails, making them feel as if they could have come from anybody. Organizations overlook this step or just assume you’ll remember who they are.

What makes you worthy for people to trust and connect? What do you do, why are you here, and why should the reader care?

Here are a few snippets I pulled from real welcome emails:

• what you do

GetFeedback makes it easy to create mobile-ready surveys.

• share your origin story

We started Karma with one simple idea: everyone should be able to get online, everywhere they go.

• specify your mission

We’re on a mission to make your working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive. [Slack]

• show people better versions of themselves

You just joined thousands of people who take control of their work and save valuable time using automation. [Zapier]

• how it works

Watch a video to quickly learn how to make the most of your Inbox.” [Google Inbox]

Timeful’s email verification message hits many of these points elegantly:

3. What’s next?

The final component of the welcome email is to build trust by setting up expectations and move readers towards your goals with clarity around what to do next.

What’s going to happen after this welcome conversation?

• Newsletter welcomes often describe what type of content and frequency to expect.
• Grubhub’s welcome email explains that subscribers will get discounts, prizes, and restaurant recommendations.
• Blue Apron explains: “each week, we promise to bring you the best, fresh ingredients along with new and imaginative recipes to enjoy.”
• Asana notifies you of 2 more emails to follow in its welcome series: “Welcome to Asana! This is the first of three emails we’ll send over in the next week to help you transition from email to Asana.”

Then, be clear about what you want readers to do next. Often this is framed as how to get started, the best suggestion for success, or ensuring you get the most out of the service or product. Some common goals for your call to action:

• download or install something like an app, browser extension, or code snippet
• watch a walkthrough video
• perform a task, like create your first project, fill out a profile, or set preferences
• reply to the email or set up a phone call
• make your first purchase (using this incentivizing discount coupon!)

Are there multiple tasks that will help someone get started or activated? Split up your welcome emails into a drip series. Getting the most out of an app or site doesn’t mean you have to stuff all that most-ness into one email

Finally, inform your new signups that they’re in good hands if they need help with any questions or concerns that come up. Be clear about how to get in touch, whether that’s a support site, email, or phone number.

• If you require assistance, have a question, or would like to suggest new features, please visit Todoist Support at https://todoist.com/Support. We’re happy to help you anytime!
• We’re here to help. If you have any questions about getting started, setting up your first automation, or saving time with Zapier, just reply to this email. Our friendly support staff will point you in the right direction, free of charge.
• We would love to get your feedback and learn about how we can help you to best manage the web apps you work with every day. Just reply to this email anytime. [Meldium]

4. Tying it all together

Editing is especially important for your welcome emails. You don’t have much of a window to make a great first impression. Your message should be clear, concise, and distinctive.

Do a final check to make sure every sentence and image serves a purpose by asking whether it meets any of these goals:

• earning trust
• building towards a particular action
• showing personal context

Now let’s see how some companies combine all the elements of the Princess Bride welcome formula:

Gilt

Gilt‘s welcome email is straightforward, quickly setting expectations of how its emails and sales work and getting you to browse and shop right away.

• Greeting: Welcome to Gilt! We’re thrilled to have you as a member.
• Who you are: Learn how to shop like a pro…Then get ready to score some amazing deals from hundreds of top designers and brands. We don’t want you to miss a thing…
• What comes next: be on the lookout for our daily emails — most sales start at noon ET every day. SHOP NOW.

Buffer

Buffer is a tool that helps you share social media content. Here’s the welcome email sent by CEO Joel and the team.

A huge part of Buffer’s company identity is its emphasis on amazing customer service and personal touch — and you can tell by the way that priority is woven throughout this entire welcome email: Every single one of us is here for you … drop us a line anytime. The whole postscript is devoted to explaining that the whole team participates in support around the clock and sets up the high and valuable expectation that you’ll hear back within hours if you reach out.

Farmigo

Farmigo is an online farmers’ market that delivers locally grown and produced food directly to your community. It’s all about the farm-to-neighborhood connection.

Greeting: Dear Janet, Thanks for joining Farmigo! Clearly you’re someone who loves delicious, fresh-from-the-farm food, and we’re happy to offer you a new way to get it.

The greeting here does a great job of making me feel part of the local food movement, enriching my sense of self-identity — which starts creating emotional affinity for a company I’ve just met.

Here the what comes next is brought to the forefront. The service involves a fair amount of logistics so the email makes clear what I have to do to get my first (incentivized!) order delivered and where to pick it up.

Who you are:

Finally, the last part of the email explains Farmigo’s origin story, mission, and values all while connecting to a certain community of people and tapping into powerful emotions like excitement, inspiration, and pride.

Shoeboxed

Shoeboxed is a tool for scanning, organizing, and keeping track of receipts and expenses for reports and taxes. Unlike Farmigo, Shoeboxed’s welcome email is extremely succinct but it includes all the necessary elements.

• Personalized Greeting: Welcome to Shoeboxed, Violet!
• Who you are: This part might have used some beefing up, but you get an idea of what Shoeboxed does because they encourage you to submit receipts.
• What comes next: The best way to get started is to download the mobile app or launch the web app.

Don’t make your welcome email sound like an impersonal, automatic form letter. Otherwise, you’re wasting an opportunity to continue making your pitch to a willing audience and saying something to be remembered by.

Submit your welcome email(s) to janet[at]customer[dot]io for a free, friendly critique!

Liked this post? Check out 5 Keys to Welcome Emails that Make Rewarding First Impressions or 5 Valuable Templates to Optimize Your Welcome Emails.

This week, I chatted with Carl Sednaoui, an email marketing consultant and co-founder of MailCharts, a tool e-commerce marketers use to uncover their next email move.

We decided to go back to the basic building blocks of email marketing: newsletters and drip campaigns. This is a great introduction for beginners, and for more advanced types, a quick refresher with helpful pro-tips and food for thought.

Here’s what you’ll learn in the next 12 minutes:

• When you use newsletters versus drip emails — and what to expect.
• What to do if you don’t have anything new to share in a newsletter.
• One great tactic that both builds relationships and improves deliverability.

AMA: We cover the basics here, but newsletters and drip emails aren’t always simple. Ask your questions in the comment section below. Carl and I will answer them!

Watch our chat:

Full transcript

Janet Choi: Hi, I’m Janet from Customer.io. I’m here today with Carl from MailCharts.

Carl Sednaoui: Hi, everybody.

Janet: And we are going to talk about our favorite thing in the whole wide world, email.

Carl: Go, email. So what are we talking about today? All the email?

Janet: Today, we could talk about all the emails but I think that would be pretty boring for everyone. So let’s just talk about two types of emails.

Carl: There’s many different types of emails that you can send out, and the most popular are drip and newsletters. One of the things as we were talking about before this, and you mentioned, is that when you speak to somebody that’s new to email marketing, it’s often hard for them to wrap their head around what is what, and when to use which one.

Janet: Sure.

Carl: So I think we can talk about that today. Does that sound like a good idea?

Janet: That sounds great, let’s start there.

Carl: All right cool, so let me share my screen with you, And I’ll share with you examples of emails. So here’s an example of a newsletter. This newsletter was sent by Any.do, which is a to-do app, and they’re announcing their Web version, and they’re saying it’s here. So they most likely send this email to their entire list at the same time, one the same date, announcing that this new product of theirs was ready.

Janet: Okay.

Carl: So this is one example of a newsletter. Another example of a newsletter will be this email here from Uniqlo that they sent to, again, most likely to their entire list during the holidays or during winter. And here, we have this great content or this beautiful image about this orange jacket followed by some pricing information and some holiday discounts, along with a few other items that they were promoting.

This is very typical to newsletters. So whenever you check your inbox and you look at the emails you received from different companies, most of the times, those are the emails you’re looking at. They’re just newsletter emails that either went to the entire list or the majority of the list. This is content that is relevant either today, or for the season, or for this week and that also includes special promotions as we saw here earlier, new announcements, things that just got out the door.

Janet: Sure.

Carl: This is what newsletters look like and when they are used. On the flip-side, there are drip campaigns. Drip campaigns are basically a series of emails that you will receive over x period of time. As an example, here’s an email from our friends at MailChimp. You see here it says, “Number 1. Getting Started with MailChimp.” This email is all about using a template or how to create your own, inside their tools. So this drip goes out to any new MailChimp subscriber. So this is the first part of it, then a few days later, you’ll go ahead and receive the second part, which is about collecting subscribers and building your list.

Here they talk about Facebook integrations and other features they have. Then if you wait a few more days, you’ll get yet another email. So here’s number three, and this one talks about how to avoid the spam folder to reach the inbox. Then you’ll get four, five, six, and so on. This is exactly what drip emails are. They’re a way to send messages or information over time in small chunks. You can think of them as bite-sized messages.

Janet: Yeah, and I think one interesting difference between them, as you were saying that with the drip emails, everyone gets the same one depending on where they are in their customer life cycle, versus the newsletter, you sort of enter the stream, where you enter the stream. If you signed up for a newsletter last week, you’ll just start getting that stream of information that they’re sending out.

Carl: Right. And then the other big pros and cons to the two is that, imagine you’re the marketer at MailChimp. You and your team go ahead and create this beautiful email drip. Once you’ve created this drip series, you can basically send it and forget it — in the sense that subscribers that join your list or become customers in a month from now, three months from now, or maybe even a year from now will still get this very viable email drip.

On the flip-side if you look at Uniqlo, the marketing team behind this has to create these newsletters on a daily basis, on a weekly basis. So it’s a lot more on-going effort that must go into generating these newsletters. Whenever you create a new email, you need to test the email, make sure all the links work properly, make sure that you have all the tracking codes, all the UTM parameters, that the template doesn’t break in different email clients. It’s a lot of on-going work to be sending newsletters on a frequent basis.

Janet: Yeah, it’s a little bit like the difference between writing a book about something where you’re done and everyone can read the same book and be helped by it or whatever. And then versus a blog post every week, where you have to keep churning out new material.

Carl: Yeah, That’s a really good comparison, actually. I hadn’t thought about it that way. Both of them have the value they provide.

Janet: Right.

Carl: And both of them have their place in your email marketing strategy. One of the things I wanted to mention when it comes to newsletters is that often times, you don’t have new things happening every week. Often times, you don’t have new products, new items to talk about every week. And the default to that, whenever the C-suite is pushing you to be sending more emails, or you yourself want to send more emails, it’s the default to promotions.

That is something that as a recipient or the newsletters, as a subscriber, it comes less and less appealing over time. If this is the seventh promotion that you’ve sent me in a row in one month, I’m less just likely to go ahead and purchase from you, then if it was the first promotion.

Janet: Right.

Carl: One of the things that I have seen done really, really nicely is what I like to call product narratives, which is one email where you highlight this one product, and you talk about this one product in-depth, and why it’s a great product. So in the example of Uniqlo, they are known or at least, from what I’ve seen in the subway ads, for creating very high-tech fabrics.

So they can have an email where they talk about one piece of clothing, article of clothing, how it was made, the process and give it a lot more life than just like, “Here is a bunch of images of products you can buy today at a discount.”

Janet: I think that is a good strategy for people, especially businesses who don’t have regularly restocked inventory, or new things to show every week. They can really go in-depth and tell a story either about a customer, or a feature, or like a product. That can be way more compelling than just giving you, “Ten percent discount”, “Limited time only”. I think that’s a good way to do newsletters without being overly promotional every single time.

Carl: Yeah, absolutely. And then on the drip side, often times, when you create a drip, you want to, before you even map what the drip is going to look like, have a goal in mind. So what is your goal? In the example we shared with MailChimp, their goal was to get new customers onboarded and to get them to know about the different features that they offer.

Janet: Right.

Carl: Right, and so they’re giving you this information one step at a time to make sure you as a customer have time to process it and digest it. That’s much more user-friendly than just sending you like, “Here’s our startup guide”, in this like 30-page PDF. Right? So that’s the goal behind this email series that they have. Sometimes you’ll have companies who’s goal is to sell.

Janet: Right.

Carl: One of the things I’d like to make sure that everybody thinks about is don’t approach your drip campaign as just a series of sales emails that are spaced with x days in between them.

Janet: Right.

Carl: Try to have some form of story that goes through all those emails that you are sending. If your goal is to drive sales, how can you drive value at first before you try to ask for the sale? Or how can you approach the drip with content that makes people keep listening and keep opening up your emails?

Janet: Yeah, I think that’s a really great point. Just the idea of dripping information out in a certain period of time doesn’t necessarily mean that the content is sales or promotional, you know. It’s sort of agnostic about the content.

But the most successful ones that I see are mostly educational, entertaining and provide value to the customer other than an offer or a sale that they want to make. That sort of builds up enough trust for them to make the sales sort of later on down the road, maybe closer to the end of the drip, or in another drip.

Carl: Exactly, and of the things I love to do in a drip for example is to try and choose your response from the subscriber. So ask them why they’re interested in, or what is their favorite article of clothing, or what are you going to do this week, whatever the case might be. And a company like Uniqlo, if they would set up a drip or maybe somebody with a volume such as MailChimp, doesn’t have the resources to handle that kind of responses or maybe don’t want to.

But if you’re a smaller company and you can do that, I really encourage you to do so because it helps you create a bond with your subscribers, and kind of build that relationship over time. It also helps with your deliverability, right? Because Gmail will see that you responded to this email address, the emails that come from this email address are much more likely to end up in your inbox than your spam folder or elsewhere.

So there’s a twofold game behind this that I think makes that really appealing. So if you can trade responses, go for it because you’ll learn a lot.

Janet: Yeah.

Carl: You’ll be surprised by how much people are willing to share.

Janet: That’s a really great point. And I think it goes to going beyond just a few of your open rates and click rates. Are these subscribers and customers actually engaged, whether you’re sending a drip email or a newsletter.

Carl: Exactly.

Janet: That’s a really great point.

Carl: Yeah, and then one last, quick thing before we wrap up.

Janet: Sure.

Carl: Whenever you create a drip, often times, you’ll see your open rate and your click rate decrease over time. And that’s because subscribers have been on your list for longer. So keep that in mind. People are never more likely to open your emails that when they’ve just signed up. Okay, I think that’s the right words. First time.

Janet: They’re most likely to open…

Carl: Exactly.

Janet: … when they’re new.

Carl: They’re most likely to open a new emails when they just sign up, versus a month from now, versus a year from now. You’ll see this tail basically, your email rate tailing off in terms of open rates and click rates, and that is expected. So as a marketer, if you see that, don’t freak out. It doesn’t mean that your second or third email are really bad. It’s just a normal user behavior that you’ll see throughout your campaigns.

Janet: Yeah, and I think that’s the same advice for doing newsletters. You’ll probably see a bigger spike with new subscribers. And then you’ll see a continual ebb and flow of unsubscribes.

Carl: Exactly.

Janet: Awesome.

Carl: All right, well this was great.

Janet: Thanks for teaching us about drip emails and newsletters.

Carl: Of course. I’ll see you next time.

Janet: All right, bye.

Carl: Bye.

What’s the most important characteristic to convey to new and prospective customers?

Let’s start by examining the two main traits that form first impressions — confidence and trustworthiness. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy explains what goes on in your head upon meeting someone new:

We’re judging how warm and trustworthy the person is, and that’s trying to answer the question, “What are this person’s intentions toward me?” And we’re also asking ourselves, “How strong and competent is this person?”

The common mistake is to play up the wrong quality. You see, while you seek trustworthiness and warmth in others — you, yourself, yearn to be admired and perceived as competent and strong. As Cuddy points out, “[T]rying to be the more dominant one in the interaction is probably … going to shut them down.”

Being trustworthy is the trump card — and first impressions stick. That’s why the welcome email is such a turning point in your digital customer relationship.

Typically, welcome emails are touted as having pretty amazing engagement rates — with Experian reporting 4x the open rate and 5x the click rate of other types of emails. But this comparison to other emails like promotions or newsletters isn’t very useful because it ignores the fact that welcome emails perform a particular and vital purpose — they help secure that crucial feeling of trust at the beginning of a customer relationship.

Read on to learn 5 ways to create awesome welcome emails that make a great, trustworthy first impression:

1. Set clear expectations.

Uncertainty is especially counterproductive at this early stage. Clarity about your identity and intentions will remove extra mental work to determine whether you’re trustworthy. This includes everything from reiterating your mission in the message copy to what email address and from name you choose.

New users and subscribers won’t really know your name. A special personal welcome email from the CEO, for example, is ineffective if I mark it as spam because I don’t recognize the name of the sender. Give as much context as you can at this first point of contact and use your company name along with a welcoming email address, like so:

• Colin from Customer.io (colin@customer.io)
• The Customer.io team (pleasereply@customer.io)
• Customer.io (win@customer.io)

As for your copywriting, be direct and helpful — or as the saying goes: “Write to express, not to impress.” Trying too hard to be clever or being overly promotional in your welcome email will confuse or turn off your reader. Nothing lowers the all-important trust factor than the feeling that the only reason someone’s talking to you is to make a buck.

Set the stage for what’s going to come next. For a welcome to a recurring newsletter, you might describe the kinds of articles and frequency to expect. For product or service welcomes, guide new users towards next steps and explain why that will bring them closer to their goals.

Here’s a welcome email from Viki that does a nice job of securing their identity and intentions for new users:

2. Connect on a personal level.

Build trust by creating a strong emotional connection and appealing to people’s sense of self.

First, make your email readers the star. Remember, they long to be confident and awesome while wanting you to be warm and trustworthy. Personalize messages using people’s names, and use the second-person “you” more than the distantly royal “We” and the off-putting selfish “I” in your copy.

Then cast the vision of how you’ll improve their life or help them become better versions of themselves. Refer back to the reasons why they might have signed up for your list or registered for your product in the first place. What problem do you help solve? What’s in it for them? That helps people decipher whether to categorize your business in the “worth it” pile over the trash.

Consider research led by neuroscientist Daniela Schiller showing how similar the brain’s process of making social snap decisions is to the mental mechanism of assigning value. First impressions activate the amygdala and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) — parts of the brain that deal with emotional learning and valuation, including “economic decision making, the assignment of subjective value to rewards under risk and uncertainty, and credit assignments in a social exchange.”

Trust is something you have to earn.

Spell out the benefits of your emails. Set expectations that you’ll provide education, help get something done, motivate towards a goal, or offer financial value through coupons or a surprise freebie. Check out the first email I got from Grubhub:

This does a great job of conveying personality while connecting with readers using the second-person and explaining the benefits to come in future emails. Not only does that incentivize me to stay subscribed for discounts and recommendations, not including them in the first email keeps this welcome message clear.

3. Don’t Babble.

Edit ruthlessly. While the welcome message’s point is to make a trustworthy first impression, it’s also most prone to that common email mistake of a “more is more” approach.

Too much choice and too much text makes information difficult to digest — which means you’ve neither eased uncertainty nor increased affinity. Just think of the in-person parallel: when you meet someone who drones on and on without regard to your reactions or needs, you zone out, shut down, or leave.

So don’t babble or try to do everything at once by cramming tips, pricing information, installation directions, upsells, and anything else you can think of all in one email.

Take a look at how Wufoo’s welcome emails have evolved. The old welcome email, while friendly in tone, presents the reader with 6 options for what to do next. That’s confusing and demotivating. Also, the first interaction probably isn’t the best time to ask for product feedback or send people over to the blog.

The new welcome email feels a little less personal, with the team member names removed and no greeting, but the message is much clearer on what to do next: create my first form!

If you have a lot to say — spread it out over multiple emails in a welcome series. That way you can progressively nurture customer relationships using education and inspiration without turning people off at first encounter.

4. Listen Up.

Nothing feels more frustrating and dodgy than an uncommunicative company that refuses to engage with customers and their problems in a human way. Every email is a customer happiness opportunity — to get feedback, start conversations, and stand out simply for treating people like people. Don’t overlook the quiet act of listening in favor of flashy, one-sided promotion.

As Amy Cuddy told Wired, one of the quickest ways to build trust is “to let the other person speak first or have the floor first. You can do this by simply asking them a question.” This tactic is especially valuable for entrepreneurs, scrappy startups, and smaller companies to turn size into a business advantage.

Groove’s CEO Alex Turnbull found that simply asking a question in their welcome message — “why did you sign up for Groove?” — is incredibly effective. This email sees a 41% response rate, and not only establishes lasting, valuable relationships with customers but collects valuable qualitative marketing data.

For Groove, the listen-first approach performed better than a product-focused message or product-specific call-to-action. “This may be because our in-app walkthrough, which we spent a lot of time improving, is good enough to keep the user engaged in their first session,” Alex explains.

Ask subscribers questions such as Why did you sign up? like Groove, What do you need help with?, or What problem are you trying to solve? Or simply ask people to share a little bit about who they are.

Here’s the welcome email that we send after people subscribe to the Customer.io newsletter, asking why they’ve signed up:

While there’s definitely room for improvement here, I love hearing from people who take the time to share their email goals and questions.

5. Get the timing right.

Note that real-time welcome emails outperform batched welcome emails by 10x (in terms of transaction rates and revenue), according to Experian. Triggering a welcome email in real-time makes it more relevant and timely.

Make it even more relevant and timely by considering the particular context of a user’s experience like signup source or product onboarding. Remember: timing, especially for behaviorial emails or a series, is something to test and optimize.

Here are some situations to think about:

• account verification: Does the user have to activate an account by verifying an email address? Is the account verification its own email or part of the welcome email itself? If it’s separate, which should come first? For instance, when you sign up for Tumblr, you’ll get a quick email to verify you account:

In this case, a friendly welcome email followed 3 days afterwards:

• onboarding: Do people generally take time to explore your app or site after signup or go through a product tour? Then your welcome email might be more effective if it’s set to send hours or even days, like Tumblr, after first signup. Are you finding time spent on your site low and bounce rates higher than you’d like? Set your welcome emails to send automatically or minutes after signup.
• user behavior: Knowing whether or not someone has taken an action like downloading something or completing a tour can change the optimal welcome time and message. What if users finally signed up for their accounts for the specific purpose of buying something? Then it doesn’t make sense to send them 2 welcome emails or encourage them to make their first purchase. That makes you seem unreliable or annoying rather than responsive and trustworthy.

Like all first impressions, welcome emails are pivotal because they both drive and predict future engagement. When done well, you acquire happier customers who understand, like, and value what you provide and valuable mental real estate for new users in the process of solving problems and making purchasing decisions.

The first impression, proactively and thoughtfully crafted, goes a long way.

Come across a great welcome email lately? Forward it to us or share with us in the comments!

Liked this post? Check out The Princess Bride Formula for Memorable Welcome Emails or 5 Valuable Templates to Optimize Your Welcome Emails.

Welcome mat photo: chrisinplymouth/Flickr

As I looked at my monthly credit card bills, I knew what had to be done.

I had to turn off 1-Click ordering on Amazon.

The conventional rule of creating a great product is to remove all the friction in the user experience. Make it easier to get stuff done at a push of a button. Friction, bad! Fast, good! Let’s take my personal finances out of the equation and look at the buy-now action that Amazon popularized. It’s the very model of a frictionless experience. See, like, want, buy, done.

Generally, people just want to get to their desired result — whether it’s to be entertained, feel more organized, learn something, or buy socks because you don’t want to do laundry. And they’ll be more likely to use your product if you help them reach their result and stay out of their way.

Friction is often your obstructive culprit, especially at that reluctant stage of new user inertia. That’s why so many sites and services use social logins using Facebook, Google, and Twitter to sign people up with one quick click. But is the one-click, quick-push method always the smartest choice?

Sometimes you need some friction to help people stick around rather than slip away.

The Art of Friction Jiujitsu

Lumosity discovered that a little bit of friction is valuable in the long run.

Getting the sign-up flow for an app or website is crucial, which is why so many use that minimal 1-click approach. Enter an email address — or better yet, click to log in with social — and boom, you’re in.

Lumosity decided to put this convention to the test, experimenting with sign-up flows with various levels of complexity. They found that having people answer questions led to fewer sign-ups, but as Sushmita Subramanian, Director of Product Design, explains: “those people who made it through were more valuable — people who were willing to invest in our product, who would pay to subscribe, who would continue to use it for a longer period.”

The current sign-up flow takes you through 5 survey questions before you can even enter your email address. Once you do, there are 2 more screens with even more questions on demographic and personal details, such as education level and how much you sleep. Still not done, you then take a “fit test” to “calibrate your starting point.”

This is friction as intentional design.

As Subramanian says, “What we found is that sometimes friction can help you acquire customers that really believe in your product, who want to build a long-term relationship with your company.”

At the end of the day, you want to prioritize having more customers rather than having more sign-ups.

Purpose-driven Friction

Your process affects not just quantity but quality of your users — which in turn impacts your workload and business. Attracting new sign-ups willy-nilly may be counterproductive, not only increasing churn but straining your support resources.

Withdrawing a credit card requirement to remove friction at signup, for example, can require more intervention to activate and onboard new users. As Planscope’s Brennan Dunn points out, when people actually make it through a paywall to sign up, they’ve done their research. He explains:

You must revisit the way you onboard new users if you drop card requirements. It’s not that you get crappier users when you drop the card requirement; you get less informed users.

Remember, it takes a combination of motivation, ability, and a trigger to enable behavior change, according to the Fogg Behavioral Model. A trigger nudges you to act — but whether you actually do take action relies on your level of motivation and ability. Friction can impede both motivation and ability. If you have to trudge up an enormous hill to return a library book, you’ll probably procrastinate.

However, friction can boost your motivation if it’s for your benefit. Lumosity emphasizes the personalization angle of its survey questions, which ultimately gets people engaged and invested enough in the app to pay. The friction here is intentionally framed as beneficial for the user. The result —10% higher subscriptions than without friction.

The takeaway is to make any points of friction purposeful. Does it serve the user or provide value to you in the long run?

How to Use Email to Calibrate Friction

Whether you want to introduce deliberate friction or remove counterproductive friction depends on user lifecycle stage and context.

There’s the friction of retention — the slow, cumulative process of other interests, apps, and everyday life crowding your product out of people’s attention until rolling at last to a stop. There’s the welcome friction problem of the happy customer who wants an upsell like annual billing or to help refer customers but doesn’t have an easy way to do so. There’s the counterintuitive Lumosity-style friction filter where adding intentional hoops to jump through is beneficial.

Often these points revolve around email, whether it’s grabbing for the gold ring of your email address as part of sign-up or using it as a trigger. Just remember that deploying emails as your trigger can also turn into counterproductive friction. Ever get a barrage of emails after signing up for a product? However well-meaning they are, they can get annoying and motivate you to hit unsubscribe.

Now, let’s look at how three companies are calibrating friction around their signup and emails:

Pinterest

Like Lumosity, Pinterest deliberately inserts friction into its user signup flow. While their first step starts with entering an email address and name, they then ask you to choose 5 topics of interest to follow. Like Lumosity, they frame this as a personalization step to “build a custom home feed for you.”

The flow then asks you to install the Pinterest browser button — and even if you choose to skip this step, they don’t let you proceed without another insistent nudge.

If you complete these screens, you’ll also find three emails in your inbox — a confirmation email to verify your address plus two others that provide education and tips about how to use Pinterest.

Pinterest understands that the up-front friction of receiving multiple emails, filling up a custom feed with existing content, and downloading a tool to pin or save content helps activate new users. All this just to get started reduces counterproductive friction down the road.

Buffer

Anyone who handles social media for a business understands the struggle to feed the never-satisfied monster of your social feeds with content. Buffer understands that pain and offers a solution that not only keeps users active (making the company happier) but also helps them accomplish their goals (making customers happier). It’s a win-win.

When your scheduled posts run out, Buffer not only sends you a quick email nudge to fill up your queue but provides 3 post suggestions to reduce the friction of having to find new content to share. A quick click on “Add to Buffer” lands you directly in your account with the post set up, and all you have to do is press a button to add it to your queue.

This double-duty nudge, keeping you actively using the tool and removing a barrier to content creation, is a genius friction-removal tactic to keep up momentum. It’s like knowing when to give somebody another push on the swings to keep them going.

Planscope

Planscope calibrates friction in its signup flow carefully, inserting deliberate extra steps on the one hand and removing barriers on the other.

At first glance, Planscope’s signup process looks like the 1-Click variety. Enter email address to open sesame to the product right away.

Upon entering your email address, though, you have to provide some more information — including details about your business, such as what field you’re in and team size. That helps Brennan and his team know who is a qualified lead (that will stick around and find Planscope’s project management tool useful) and reach out accordingly.

This mini-survey also personalizes an onboarding process, where the friction of not knowing where to start is removed. After completing the sign-up flow, you’ll see a demo project — that corresponds to the field of work you’ve chosen in the sign-up flow — already in progress with tasks, time, and budget already filled in.

This sample material provides a mental shortcut to understanding the possibilities of the tool and learning how to use it. For example, when I created my first project, I didn’t quite get the distinction between Task Group and Task Name, and referring back to the demo data helped me figure it out in seconds.

Creating a completely frictionless experience might mean that people sign up and then slide right on through to inactivity and cancellation, like a slippery bar of soap.

Instead of simply identifying where friction appears in your user journeys and stamping it out, examine where you want to intervene with a trigger or put the brakes on the speed of the journey and why. It’s a matter of purposeful design as well as continual recalculation and recalibration to get everyone — and your business — where they want to go.

Have you ever seen other successful examples of calibrating friction? We’d love to hear your thoughts and stories in the comments.

The dating site OkCupid provides a fascinating window into humanity. One of the most surprising facts I discovered about this humanity is that its greatest love is reserved for an object. Routinely listed as one of the “6 things I could never do without”? The iPhone.

Yes, Apple is superior at capturing hearts than my comrades-in-courtship and I are. Indeed, their iPhones have achieved what marketers call “heart share,” a concept uncommonly invoked in the world of hard metrics and market shares.

In 1989, Dr. Ellen Day, a professor at the University of Georgia, defined the term “share of heart” in The Journal of Consumer Marketing, as an indication of the “emotional relationship between a consumer and a particular branded product, retailer, or service provider.”

Emotion often takes a backseat in the everyday details of building a business, either pooh-poohed as impractical or lost in the shuffle when it comes to priorities. Day identifies a familiar tendency of marketers’ to over-intellectualize products, as we zoom in on our awesome features and exciting milestones. The problem, she explains, is that “often the marketer’s focus is on product attributes, while consumers concerns themselves more with intangible benefits.”

Over 20 years later, things haven’t changed much from Day’s observation. As onboarding and marketing expert Samuel Hulick put so well, using Mario and the fire flower power-up in his popular illustration:

People don’t buy products; they buy better versions of themselves. When you’re trying to win customers, are you listing the attributes of the flower or describing how awesome it is to throw fireballs?

Why does emotion work so well and how do companies like Apple use it to create such strong connections?

The Sticking Power of Emotion

First of all, making an emotional connection allows you to capture both heart and mind.

Emotional memories are particularly powerful and sticky. Neuroscientist, Wendy Suzuki, illustrates this point beautifully in a moving story about why she studies memory.

When Suzuki started her career, she was fascinated by the physiology of memory and all its mechanistic details. Her perspective shifted when she came across a quote in a New York Times profile of the world-famous chef, Thomas Keller, who realized with the death of his father, that: “At the end of the day when we think about what we have, it’s memories.”

Suzuki soon experienced the depth and longevity of emotional memories herself. When she learned her father was starting to suffer from dementia, the news moved her to try to shake up her family’s reserved habits. She wanted to be more outwardly emotional and expressive — specifically, to say to each other “I love you” out loud, a sentiment always understood but rarely voiced.

Her parents agreed to try out the new practice on one of her weekly Sunday calls with them. That first time was understandably awkward and uncomfortable. On the phone with her dad the following Sunday, Suzuki realized that he might not remember their agreement when he’d been having trouble navigating to the 7-11 where he’d been buying his morning coffee for the last 30 years.

She was ready to remind him, but — “that week he said ‘I love you’ first,” she recounts. “And he said ‘I love you’ first every single week after that.” As a neuroscientist, she realized what was happening:

“emotional resonance is helpful for memories. It really pushes those memories into our long-term memory, so the beautiful emotion of his daughter asking him whether she can say ‘I love you’ … beat dementia and allowed him to form a new memory.”

In a world bombarding and blasting you with messages competing for your money, time, and attention, real emotion is what cuts through the noise and lasts. It’s what you have at the end of the day.

Create Emotional Attachment With the 3 E’s

Amazingly, marketers can create emotional memories and resonance in a relationship that, let’s face it, usually starts out and often stays pretty indifferent.

Researchers at USC Marshall School of Business examined what it is about brands like Apple and Manchester United that captures people’s hearts and discovered that they reduce the psychological distance between themselves and the consumer.

Basically, brands get up close and personally meaningful. There are 3 factors — the “3 E’s” — that go into building closer emotional attachments by relating to people’s sense of self: enticement, enablement, and enrichment. And it turns out that these factors are an even better predictor of actual purchasing behavior than what people self-report on what they’d do.

Enticement appeals to aesthetic needs and the senses. As the researchers explain, entice with “any combination of sensory experiences — visual, auditory, gustatory, tactile, olfactory, thermal, and/or kinesthetic.”

Starbucks, for example, designs an experience that’s all-around pleasing to the senses. You walk in and smell freshly-ground coffee, sit on comfy chairs, hear soothing music, see tranquil colors, taste pumpkin spice flavored things. That overall experience is part of its brand and why people return to get their fix.

Enablement appeals to functional needs. By creating a sense of efficacy, you tap right into people’s emotions about themselves. To repeat Hulick, “people are buying better versions of themselves.”

Whether it’s a fancy chef’s knife or an app on your phone — if a product helps you get stuff done, you’ll relish that autonomy and sense of control. That’s a pretty great feeling.

Enrichment appeals to spiritual and self-expression needs. This factor is the most abstract but perhaps also the most powerful. Brands that resonate with your values and reflect a sense of yourself and your aspirations feel inherently personal.

Take TOMS, a brand known for giving away a pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair you buy. When people purchase and wear TOMS, they’re fulfilling a do-gooder identity that they crave.

Whether it’s TOMS or a luxury brand — when you are what you buy, you’ll most likely love what you’re buying.

How to Attain Heart-Share Through Emails

Emails are an ideal medium for creating emotional resonance with customers. After all, email is all about people and relationships.

To bring you closer to your customers, consider how much value they can experience regarding the 3Es of enticement, enablement, and enrichment in your emails.

Here are a few examples of companies delivering on those 3 E’s to create memorable emotional connections and in doing so, create effective marketing.

Warby Parker

Warby Parker’s emails regularly tap into enrichment by featuring hip glasses at hip prices, appealing to people who identify as trendy but down-to-earth. In one of their year-end emails, they play into that self-expression appeal even further by timing the company’s annual report with the chance for their audience to make their own quirky, charming annual report.

Poncho

Poncho delivers personalized weather reports based on your routine and preferences (it’s only available in some areas right now). Poncho’s emails appeal to the senses with cheerful bright colors, clean layout, and adorable poncho-wearing cat mascot. Since Poncho emails are highly functional, reliably preparing me for my day and night, while also offering jokey, often sympathetic copy and the occasional excellent GIF — I’ve become quite attached to these twice-a-day emails.

Kollecto

Educational content and email courses are great for connecting with people by delivering enabling value.

Kollecto is a service that delivers personalized art recommendations to start and grow an art collection. Like many other sites, Kollecto offers a free course to get people to sign up for its email list. (Unlike many others, I’ve opened and enjoyed every single email.)

The month-long course on affordable art is fun, informative, and pulls you into what Kollecto is doing as a business. The 3rd lesson, for example, teaches you how to describe your tastes in art. Then, if you submit what you come up with, a Kollecto art advisor will find 3 pieces of art based on what you wrote. By both enabling and getting you to participate in a personal process, Kollecto accumulates some great heart share points.

Food52

Food52’s emails feature beautiful, mouthwatering photography. With a minimum of copy and soothing color scheme, the aesthetics here all focus on the food, and their emails tend to make me want to dive into the pictures themselves. I’m sure they’ll settle for the available reality of diving in via clickthrough.

OkCupid

While the most direct way emails can entice the senses is visual design and images, don’t forget the power of words to create a sensory or emotional experience. Take this email I got from OkCupid telling me to check out a certain stone cold fox named Juno. It was a funny, entertaining little email that got me to click through to the site and like the brand a little more for the experience of the joke.

When marketing emails blast and urge and push and hype, customers feel disconnected, tune out, and unsubscribe. You can’t deliver value by only talking about and appealing to your own self.

Remember, to get people to love iPhones so much, Apple doesn’t talk up its technical specifications, it tugs at the heartstrings by showing you the possibilities of what you can do.

Create emotional affinity by creating value and meaning. When you strengthen emotional attachment with your customers by appealing to the senses, level up their awesomeness, and enrich their identity, you’ll start to win over their hearts.

What brands do you feel strong emotional affinity (or aversion) for? We’d love to know!