How to Win Email Friends and Influence People

Author:

Anna Russell

Source:

Words can lift our spirits, darken our moods, catch us by surprise and inspire us to take action. Words have the power to build lifelong allegiances or irrevocably sever relationships. This is important stuff we're talking about here. And depending on how you speak to consumers in your emails, you can either win them over or wind up in the trash folder.
 
Take a look at the following phrases and think about how they make you feel:
 
· "I have a dream." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
· "You ought to get out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini." -- "Every Day's A Holiday"
 
· "He-e-e-e-e-'re's Johnny." -- "The Shining"
 
· "At my signal - unleash hell." -- "Gladiator"
 
· "Yes, we can." - President Barack Obama
 
According to the Journal of Advertising Research and cited by Dan Hill in his book "Emotionomics," emotions are twice as important as facts in making purchasing decisions. In fact, the emotional side of our brain is both larger and faster-acting than our rational one. Our gut reactions are triggered in three seconds or less.
 
For those who have read this column before, that stat might ring a bell? Generally we have three seconds to catch the attention of an email recipient, so you've got to make an impression and make it fast. Given what we've just learned about the emotional brain, wouldn't it be fair to assume a consumer's gut reaction is crucial to an email's success? The last thing you want is to be deleted -- or worse still, have the spam button hit. Ahh the pain of undertaking all that analysis, message testing, creative crafting and data collection, just to be "spammed." ...
 
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