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It’s all a matter of writing a phenomenal persuasive email, and it gets better if we know how to do it the AIDA way.
We have all been there…
We have thought for hours and have carefully crafted an important email. Edited it at least 10 times before we sent it out to a list of our contacts – only to sit back and wait for replies, which might not even turn up. Sometimes, getting replied to the emails seems like a Herculean task.
Emails happen to be one of the biggest sources of stress in modern-day work-life. An average professional spends nearly four hours each day dealing with emails, and infinitely more time just thinking about those messages.
However, you can’t always blame the receiver for not having replied. There are so many advertisements, promotions, sales pitches, newsletters, and more that land up in ones’ mailbox that people are experiencing what is called the “advertisement-fatigue” or the “email-fatigue”.
Finding the sweet-spot to engage your mail subscribers, with the right content and the right email frequency to get maximum responses can be as overwhelming as Goldilocks finding the right bowl of porridge! However, cutting through all the noise and getting replies to emails can be much easier than you think.
Let me explain how in a little more detail.
In the 19th century, 1898 to be precise, Elias St. Elmo Lewis, an American advertising advocate wrote a column (anonymously) in a printing magazine called ‘The Inland Printer’ where he first spoke about advertising principles that he found most useful throughout his career. This was the first time the concept of AIDA was spoken about.
Ever since then, AIDA has been one of the most popular and widely used principles across advertising and marketing circles. Tons of organizations have based their entire marketing strategies around the AIDA model.
Before looking into how this model can be applied to your email marketing strategy, let’s understand what it is. AIDA model describes the natural progression of a customer before he/she makes a purchase decision. The different stages include – Attraction, Interest, Desire and Action (AIDA).
In the case of email marketing, this is the progression you see from the time your subscriber sees your email to the time they click on the link in the email.
Being able to write persuasive content is an invaluable skill for all marketers. By creating content and email campaigns with the AIDA model in mind, you stand to gain a lot more control over your prospects' path to a purchasing decision.
As your prospects progress through different stages of the AIDA model, they get to learn about the brand, eventually develop an emotion towards the brand, which will further compel them towards acting on it. Let’s take a look at how the AIDA model can prove to be a great persuasive email example.
As the title suggests, the first step is to grab the attention of your email subscriber. Research shows that an average person receives nearly 92 emails each day. Needless to say, an email that doesn’t grab the attention of your subscriber, gets deleted even before it’s read. There are two rudimentary parts of every email that first grab the attention of a user – the sender’s name and the subject line.
A mail that is sent out from a generic sender like “info”, “support”, “marketing”, “no-reply” etc. is often overlooked by people. What’s worse is the fact that emails from such senders often end up in spam folders. However, when people receive emails from a friendly sender – with a specific name – it is definitely bound to get some attention.
The next part is the subject line. A good subject line is crucial to grab a reader's attention so that he/she opens the email – giving you a chance to generate some interest and desire about the brand. If the subject line is not good or is poorly written, it can make the rest of the mail irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how engaging or well written the mail is when it doesn’t get opened in the first place.
So, how to construct an effective subject line? Effective subject lines are easy to construct when you use psychological pulls like the ones stated below.
Whatever strategy you choose to build your subject line, just ensure that it is of optimum length – neither too short, nor too long. Most email carriers offer only 50 characters to write your subject line. Make sure you use them wisely.
Once you have successfully enticed your user to open the email, the next step is to generate interest – about your brand, product or service. You need to get the user hooked on to the information you are sharing and engage them, right in the first paragraph. You need to give them a solid reason to read your message further. Using one of the tricks like below can help to generate that kind of interest:
The next step in the process is where things get persuasive. Once the user ahs opened the email, and has gained some interest in the content you have shared, he needs to next get inspired to act on the message you have shared. Without this burning desire, your users might even discontinue reading the email or just read it through without clicking any links or just go on to delete the email.
Here are some ways to create that desire in your users:
So, offering rewards like – special prices, extended offers, reward points, gift cards etc. can help to create a desire to take action sooner rather than later. To further ease the rewarding process, your automation platform, be it HubSpot, Active Campaign, Zoho CRM, or similar platforms, can simply be integrated with a rewards platform like Xoxoday Plum. Based on the workflow that is set up in your CRM / marketing automation platform, rewards are automatically sent to the user, in real-time – making the whole process more powerful.
Once you have created the interest and desire in your user’s minds, there is only one simple step left to be done – telling the user what to do next – or what is simply called the “call to action (CTA)”. In this step, you precisely need to tell your user what action you want them to take – do you want them to download an ebook, or register for a webinar, or sign up for your product free trial, or should they simply pick up the phone and call you. Whatever it is that you want them to do, you need to precisely instruct them and let them know how they can enjoy the benefits that you have promised earlier.
Using a rewards automation platform to appreciate your users’ actions – be it a sign-up on your page, product purchase, or webinar registration - sending out a reward can build a bond that goes a long way. Xoxoday Plum, which can be integrated into your existing CRM / marketing automation platform like HubSpot, Active Campaign, Zoho CRM etc. offers a wide range of reward options like branded gift cards, vouchers for dining experiences, eCommerce gift cards, etc. across 20+ categories. These can be automatically sent to your users as soon as they take some action.
While getting people to open your emails and respond to them is a daily struggle to most marketers, using a tried and tested formula like the AIDA method can help significantly improve the response rates.
Using technology platforms like marketing/sales automation platforms integrated with powerful rewards engines (like Xoxoday Plum) to send emails, track user behavior, mail performance etc. and automatically send rewards helps to build a stronger bond between the brand and the user.
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