For that, you need targets to open, read, and respond to your emails.
Two problems:
People send and get 347.3 billion emails daily now, so the chances of yours getting lost in their inboxes are 99.9%.
Even if you are among that 0.01% noticed, your chances of getting opened are 26.80%.
Modern users are selective about the phone number database information they get online, and they can smell a blatant marketing message a mile away.
How do you grab their attention and persuade them to open, read, and respond to yours?
Address linguistic psychology.
Certain words and language patterns influence how we perceive and react to information. By factoring in behavioral science and tweaking emails accordingly, you can encourage recipients to respond. It’s not about manipulating or playing mind games with users; it’s about actionable writing tactics allowing your marketing message to stand out.
Related read: Behavioral segmentation examples & best strategies
In this article, we’ll reveal the secret power of email language to help you write and structure emails destined to convert.
Email language: make them click
Let’s start with our oldy-moldy email subject lines again: 47% of recipients will open an email based on the subject line alone, so precise attention to its structure and phrases is critical.
What’s the catch?
Your email will never get opened if its subject line doesn’t provide a motivator for a user to click on it. The motivators for increasing response rates are six: fear, anger, greed, need for approval, guilt, and exclusivity.
Here’s how each can look like:
Fear: “TODAY ONLY: 55% OFF an entire year of Premium”
Anger: “5 things your tax expert doesn’t want you to know”
Greed: “Buy 2 today and get 1 more for free!”
Need for approval: “Stay trendy with our new collection”
Guilt: “We’ve missed you. Can we buy you a drink?”
Exclusivity: “This offer is for the first 50 subscribers only”
So, the first thing you need to do before writing an email subject line is to decide on a motivator to place there. Thus, you’ll understand what tactics to use in a subject line to trigger the desired psychological response.
And below are psychological tricks to use in subject lines to make the audience open your email:
Use numbers
The human brain is wired for numbers as they make the content easier to digest. Numbers provide order to chaos, tricking the brain into assuming they are more efficient because we see the end goal and understand we can reach it for a dopamine release.
That is why listicles are so popular. And no wonder that subject lines with numbers have a 57% more open rate.
Subject line for the email from Techsparks featuring the number: "7 reasons to attend"
You can take a step further and consider the psychology behind odd and even numbers. While even numbers look friendlier, odd ones are more thought-provoking and encourage users to click.
Need the double effect from numbers in the subject lines?
Use two numbers! While the first one invites users to learn more, the second one motivates them to open the email and get the answer to their what’s-in-there-for-me question.
The above “Buy 2 today and get 1 more for free” is an example of using this rule coming from neuro writing tactics. More on that is below.
Try neuro writing tactics
Neuro writing is a set of tricks we use when crafting marketing texts to appeal to human psychology, hook users, and influence their engagement and motivation to learn more and purchase.
Those tricks refer to mental hacks in content headlines, subheaders, and bodies. Speaking of email subject lines, you can try the following:
Beneficial adjectives. They work as motivators and address a user’s curiosity and FOMO. Such adjectives are beneficial because they explain to recipients why your email is worth their attention.
"exclusive content for your website" email subject line
Free, quick, updated, improved, special, exclusive, and bargain – all are beneficial adjectives to mention in email subject lines when applicable.
Quotes. Quotation marks work as social proof. Using an expert quote (relevant to your email’s context) or formatting a sentence from the email body accordingly, you signal trustworthiness to a user. Quotes imply that someone has already tried the product and can vouch for it.
Questions. Formatting your subject line as a question encourages the reader to provide an answer, and to do that, they’d have to interact with your content. Questions spark curiosity and appeal to a human’s social instinct, the brain’s mechanism making us crave approval,
