You've Got Mail | Coherent Path

You’ve Got Mail

Written by Franco Varriano.

1. Overview

Last week, I had the pleasure to attend the Sales Machine Summit in New York. One of the speakers, Robin Dreeke, mentioned that in order to get people to do what we want, we should stimulate the part of the brain that releases dopamine. In other words, people should feel as refreshed after talking to us the same way they do after a fitness session.

That is quite an interesting concept, and much more feasible in person as you get to read the body language of the person and adjust your communication along the way. Can we do the same with email? How can one send emails that excite people to the point where they are looking forward to opening, reading and engaging with it. In today’s article, we are exploring the art of amazement via email.

Most of us saw the movie You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The film is about two people in an online romance who are unaware that they are also business rivals. They mailed each other on a daily basis and developed feelings for each other.

For us, members of the ecommerce universe, we can’t easily build those feelings with each of our customers as we are not communicating with one but hundred/thousands of people at the same time. From that standpoint, we are already at a disadvantage. We are not dealing with the person face to face and we are not dealing with one person, we’re dealing with thousands of people over email. So how can we get people excited to open, read and engage with our emails? One word: Anticipation.

To get people excited to engage with our content, we need to create positive anticipation before sending the email. Positive anticipation leads to excitement, which leads to releasing a natural happiness drug known as dopamine. According to Nicole Lazzaro, a psychology professor at Stanford University, dopamine is involved more with anticipation than the actual “happiness” feeling. She describes it as a striving emotion. The same principles can be incorporated into encouraging customers to get hooked on your email marketing. Your brand’s online presence should be the engine behind the positive anticipation. Your customers are following you all over the internet, it’s time to reward them by releasing dopamine.

One of our customer that uses social media to get people to anxiously wait for their email is Kith NYC. With more than a hundred thousand followers on Twitter, they get a lot of engagement online. They’ve managed to tweet customers every time they send an email and answer questions about what the email is about (usually a special promotion), which gets people to jump on their inbox to see the details (as the 140 character limit doesn’t say much).

Like the image above, it doesn’t have to be fancy, you need to get your customers hooked on your message. If Kith NYC can do it with tweets, you can do it too. Remember, create positive anticipation in the mind of your customers and watch your email marketing ROI skyrocket.

2. Conclusion

If you’re an ecommerce merchant and don’t have automated email marketing campaigns setup for your store, you’re losing money. Right now.

Rare.io makes it easy to start using automated email campaigns for common challenges like: Welcome Series, Abandoned Carts, Order Follow-up emails and more! You can learn more about our powerful email marketing automation features here or go ahead and get started right away by using Rare.io for FREE.

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And if you’re one of the thousands of merchants who are already using Rare’s Smart Email Marketing software and want to see how our Customer Success Team can work with your brand to grow your revenue – feel free to book a call at your convenience here.