Want to make your back in stock emails convert? Here’s how to use marketing psychology.
Marketers often track all important aspects of an email campaign. They carefully personalize their lists, meticulously design their creatives, write captivating content and optimize it to render impressive results on various devices.
But sometimes they still get dismal open rates and returns on investment. This is because marketers are sometimes guilty of neglecting an important aspect- human psychology.
By making use of psychological hacks for email marketing campaigns, you will see a sharp uptick in your business’s revenue and open rates because people love getting their hands on special offers.
What is marketing psychology and how it can boost conversions
Advertising and marketing are deeply rooted in psychology. This is not only because you need to appeal to a consumer’s emotions, but it’s because consumers are haphazard. As consumers, people tend to sometimes act without reason and a way to leverage the biases that influence consumer behavior is by understanding human psychology.
With this knowledge, digital marketers have found themselves with a variety of insights that they can apply to their digital advertising campaigns. The result of implementing these hacks is an effective presence for businesses in every channel and customer touchpoint.
Keeping this in mind, let’s look at 20 examples of how you can use marketing psychology for email marketing to boost restocking email conversions for your eCommerce business.
20 marketing psychology hacks for restock alert emails
Understanding the psychology of email marketing is vital to your campaign’s flourishing success. To do that, let’s look at the top tips and tricks you can use for future campaigns:
1. Scarcity
When sending out restock notifications regarding the availability of a product, you can use the numbers tactic. That is, let the subscribers of your mailing list know that a certain item is back in stock and in limited units or that it’s selling out fast.
This method drives home a sense of urgency by compelling them to take quick action. With limited supply, consumers will experience FOMO (fear of missing out) and start adding products to their carts instantly.
2. Incentives
A customer might have shown interest in your product earlier but the interest may drop off by the time you restock. So, add incentives for purchasing the product to push them down the sales funnel. These incentives could be free shipping, a discount, reward points, etc.
3. Popularity
Restock Notifications, an excellent way to connect with your customers, but how can you ensure yours stand out from the crowd? By providing social proof in your back-in-stock messages!
Referring to this trend across your restock emails will help you build trust with your customers as well as get their attention when it matters most: when a product is available for sale again!
4. Reciprocity
This phenomenon refers to when one person’s action elicits another person’s reaction. Applying this theory to email psychology, your brand can offer customers a token of appreciation to guarantee their continued business. Again, this strategy requires incentivising patrons to nudge them to make a purchase.
5. Curiosity
This is a great motivator for people to interact with a business. By not having all the information at their disposal, consumers will feel the need to fill that gap. This can prove to be a rather strong driving force to boost product sales. This can be implemented along the lines of “We’re restocking your favorite items tomorrow at 12 pm. Keep an eye out!”
6. Innovation bias
This bias occurs when people are compelled to adopt new innovations assuming they might be good. It can be applied to restock emails to drive higher conversions. For instance, Colgate’s Active Salt Toothpaste. It wasn’t the first time someone put salt in their toothpaste but by emphasizing its novelty in their marketing efforts, Colgate encouraged a high volume of consumers to shop their latest launch.
Similarly, e-commerce platforms like Myntra put together outfits that look fresh to help their customers get a wardrobe upgrade.
7. Cocktail party effect
While this refers to the brain’s ability to filter out unnecessary auditory stimuli, it can also be applied to the visual psychology of email marketing. You can do this by getting rid of excess visual elements in your campaign and making use of a minimal design with a clear CTA to increase your sales.
8. Foot in the door technique
This is a classic example of persuasion where you make small requests and increase the ask when the other person accepts those requests. You can use this strategy to get customers to purchase products and also leave reviews for them.
9. Anchoring
Do you have products that could be perceived as expensive? Using the anchoring technique of marking down prices from the original generally persuades people to purchase it immediately. So, instead of only writing the purchase price as $100, you can instead write the initial price and use a strikethrough (for example, $150) with the new price.
Similarly, anchoring can also be used when comparing two products to motivate buyers to purchase one of the two options, which will generally be the cheaper product.
10. Authority bias
Are you working with influencers or celebrities for your brand? Include a testimonial or an image of them using your product in the newsletter. By doing so, you are showing the people in authority love your product which, in turn, will compel your audience to purchase from you.
11. Information bias
This is a cognitive bias that leads people to believe that the more information they have about something, the better their decision will be. So, even if you provide irrelevant information to a consumer, they are more likely to purchase from you owing to the fact that you shared more information with them. A great way to implement this is to list the features or benefits of your products in the email newsletter.
12. Choice paradox
Many brands provide a host of choices for their audiences while promoting their products. However, this could lead to them not being able to make a decision. You can fix this issue by having only a few choices that can make a customer’s decision-making journey easier. Marketers can implement this by choosing the best selection of products that were restocked and then include them in the newsletter.
13. Exposure effect
Also known as the familiarity effect, the mere exposure effect is when people favor things that they have been exposed to previously. When applying it to email psychology, marketers can send a few emails in their campaigns so that customers recognise them and are urged to make a purchase due to mere exposure.
14. Positioning effect
Commonly known as the serial position effect, this psychological phenomenon describes how people tend to forget the content in the middle and remember things that are mentioned in the beginning (primacy effect) or towards the end (recency effect).
Going by this theory, marketers can present important information right at the beginning of their emails like the subject and the headline and at the end of the newsletter by using a persuasive and actionable CTA.
Instead of bombarding the viewers with too much information in the center of the email, you can try to make use of vibrant imagery to keep them hooked and focused on what you have to offer to them.
15. Color psychology
While most of the above psychological hacks are focused on the copy of the email, this one is directed towards the imagery you use. Of course, you must make use of your brand colors in every campaign but how you use them in conjunction with other colors will be the differentiator between a successful and an unsuccessful email campaign.
In case you are using a bright image in your campaign, try to keep the background color a demure hue. Additionally, if your email design flow uses neutral colors throughout, try to use a CTA button that adds a pop of color to break the monotony and trigger an action.
When designing the sections of your email campaigns, try to incorporate analogous colors to show a smooth transition. Alternatively, you can use jarring combinations to draw focus to the important content like offers on restocked items or to break the monotony and have distinct sections.
16. Loss aversion bias
This cognitive bias talks about people experiencing a stronger psychological impact if they lose out on something as compared to when they gain something. Like people experience FOMO when you use scarcity tactics to sell a product, trying to show them that they are losing if they do not purchase your restocked item, will trigger them to add your product to their cart almost immediately.
A great way to implement this in your restocking email campaigns is by subtly mentioning it in the copy. An example of it could be along the lines of– “Hurry and shop our top items in our 4th of July restock sale before they are sold out.”
An example like this makes use of scarcity tactics and loss aversion to build FOMO in their customers to drive sales.
17. Projection bias
This cognitive bias leads people to overestimate how much their future beliefs (or tastes) will mirror their current ones. This can lead people to purchase more than they need and increase your sales drastically.
Conversely, projection error leads us to believe what we find important might be true for all. So, marketers should be careful about where they place importance in a campaign.
18. Decoy effect
Also known as the asymmetrical dominance effect or attraction effect, this cognitive bias leads people to change their opinion between two products when a third product is introduced to the mix.
So, when you are promoting your restocked items, try to sell the products as a 3-item package or along the lines of ‘buy 2, get the 3rd item for 20% off.”
19. Halo effect
Also known as the halo error, this cognitive bias leads people to have favourable opinions about their overall experience based on a smaller attribute. When you look at it from a marketing perspective, if a customer has liked your product previously, you can get them to purchase your other products too, as they might be inclined to view them positively.
When you further look at it from an email marketing perspective, consumers are more likely to purchase from you if your email design visually appeals to them. This is because they will associate the visual attractiveness of the email flow with the attractiveness of the product.
To seal the deal and increase the customer’s lifetime value, make sure to properly segment the email and personalize them for the target audience.
20. Hobson’s +1 choice effect
In the paradox of choice, we discussed how people tend to not make a decision when faced with many options. However, this is only true when there are more than three options.
So, what do you do when you’re dealing with fewer choices already? You implement the ‘Hobson’s choice’ technique. It talks about having only one choice and if you do not take it, you take nothing at all.
Unfortunately, when presented with the “take it or leave it” option, most consumers will choose to leave it. So, to combat its effects, marketers can add a second option to their offering. This will motivate customers to choose one of the two options.
You can use this in your email campaign by presenting the subscribers with either two restocked product recommendations or two CTAs. More often than not, they will end up choosing one option between the two.
Summing up
As we all know, marketing is a competitive field and so it’s important to always be looking for new ways to get an edge over the competition. Using email psychology to your advantage can be a great way to do this.
With RetainIQ’s customisable restocking email flows and more, your brand can soon start boasting of higher open rates.
Want to get started? Book a demo today!