Email marketing isn’t the only strategy your business should be using but it is one of the best and most effective. In fact, combined with social media marketing you have an extremely powerful tool for reaching potential customers.

Coupling these two strategies can be a bit tricky but done properly you can expand your subscriber base and create a more personal method of utilizing the social environment.

Let’s focus on the email side of this strategy and the emotional and psychological triggers to which most people will respond.  These are triggers that are used every day in social media settings some of which you may already be using without knowing it. Prior to deciding which emotional triggers you should use to use, a goal for your email campaign should be determined. Is the goal to develop and nurture leads, improve your relationship with your customers,  or are the emails intended for sales promotion? Knowing your goal you can then choose from the seven basic emotions that influence decisions.

Those seven emotions are Belonging, hope, guilt, vanity, fear, lust and greed.  Obviously, you won’t be using all seven in every email campaign which is why establishing your goal is important. 

Let’s look at each Trigger

  1. Belonging: Everyone wants to be included and to feel they are part of something larger than just themselves. Make is easy for the reader to subscribe to your mailing list thus creating a relationship with him or her.
  2. Hope: Create the feeling that what the customer wants is what the customer can have. Give them a reason to feel this way and then follow through.
  3. Guilt: You can play on this emotion to get the reader believe they have a chance to right a wrong or improve something. By getting them to feel responsible for a wrong, whether real or imagined, you can get the customer to act.
  4. Vanity: They say, “Flattery will get you nowhere,” but in this case flattering the reader with praise regarding their cleverness or wise decision-making will get their attention and possibly their business.
  5. Fear: This is a sense of panic or dread. Get the reader to believe something may go terribly wrong if they don’t act. Make the impending danger sound so real as to entice the reader to respond.
  6. Lust: This emotion is usually associated with sexual desires it encompasses more than that. Lust refers more to an uncontrolled desire or excessive craving for something such as food, drink, material possessions etc. Dangle the proverbial carrot on the stick in front of the customer to get them to respond.
  7. Greed: It seems that everyone wants more of something. Appeal to the customer’s desire for more money, power or possessions.

After you have established the goal of your email marketing campaign and determined which triggers to use you are ready to begin. As a general rule each email should be personalized and include at least one emotional trigger and a “call to action (CTA).” Personalization is critical. Personalized emails generate 600% higher CTRs (Click Through Rate). This will make your customers feel like they are having a conversation not just being talked at. Using the reader’s name and possibly other personal information helps create this feeling.