Build Your Email List with A Little Psychology February 21, 2019, | Posted by Samantha

Marketing efforts of all kinds, and especially email marketing, are rife with appeals to consumer psychology. Even if we aren’t aware of it, psychology plays a role in almost every decision we make, and marketing is a major area in which a little psychological trickery can go a long way. One of the major and continuing goals of marketers is to grow the list of prospects as much as possible; after all, every new email recipient is a prospective sale. Using a little bit of psychology can boost your results and keep people signing up, which is exactly what you want. Site Impact’s experts have long studied the psychology of marketing, and we have a few tips and tricks for list building that you can benefit from.

Use a two-step opt-in process

This seems on the surface like something that would discourage people from following through with subscribing; in fact, there is a strong psychological foundation behind why it works. The Zeigarnik effect described the tendency of people to not want to abandon a task unfinished; in this case, that would be stopping the subscription process without confirming the subscription or going through the final step--whatever that might be. Of course, you don’t want to make it too difficult for people to sign up, but making it two steps instead of just one on the site where you get people to register makes it more likely that they’ll go through with it. Consider a first step where they provide their email and a second step where they confirm their preferences--it will not only make prospective subscribers feel more in control of their experience, but also appeal to their lack of desire to abandon the task incomplete.

Put the psychology of color to work

Different colors elicit different reactions from people; that is a founding premise of many decisions in marketing. When it comes to list building, one of the more common factors to employ this strategy is the CTA--the call to action. This does and will require some testing and modification to work on a rolling basis, but different colored CTA buttons have been shown in multiple studies to help or hinder efforts at getting people to sign up. Of course, once you know the best colors to get your key demographic groups to respond, you can incorporate those colors into your email marketing layouts for even better results from your subscribers as well--taking care of two concerns with one effort.

Building and growing a robust email subscriber list can seem like a chore, and certainly it’s a continual process for all brands and marketers. But with a few psychological tricks, you can make it an easier and more rewarding process to keep getting new subscribers--which in turn translates to more prospects and more conversions. With the right use of psychology, you can not only get more people interested in hearing what you have to say--you can also gain more conversions among the interested people. Contact Site Impact to learn how we put psychology to use in every campaign we build with our clients, to get the best ROI possible.