Psychology Tips For Writing Effective Cold Emails

Posted on October 19, 2018 by Gary

By Natalie Andersen

Email marketing is a digital twist on selling door-to-door. The whole idea may seem pointless and like a massive waste of time. After all, nobody likes unsolicited advertisement, right?

Well, not exactly, as email marketing has the highest ROI rates of all marketing strategies. To put it in simple terms: it generates the most money for the least effort.

Just like in real life, it’s not easy to get the attention of your potential customers or business partners and keep them engaged past the first sentence online. To achieve fruitful results and increase sales via email marketing you must be aware of certain psychological subtleties that are involved in it.

Table of Contents

Good Deals Don’t Last Forever

According to Amanda Sparks, a digital marketing specialist and author of TopDownWriter blog:

People love limited offers and sales as is patently evident by holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Some would have you believe that our consumerist culture is responsible for this, but this isn’t so. The reason why events like Black Friday are popular are rooted deep in our psychology; in large part, it’s due to a form of social anxiety called the Fear Of Missing Out that most people suffer from.

You can use FOMO to your advantage to generate more sales by creating scarcity and urgency through limited-time bonuses and discounts. This strategy works best with a target industry. If there was a good deal on an item you don’t really need, you probably wouldn’t buy it anyway.

How to use FOMO?

Fortunately, FOMO has an answer for that, too. If you add some exclusivity to the mix, you may even attract parties outside your target market. Everyone wants to feel like a part of a VIP club and have something that no one else has.

Scarcity has been a staple in the marketing business for the longest time. It will never stop working as long as the human psyche remains the same.

…explains James Daily, a writer, content manager, and blogger at Brainished.

Brevity Is A Key

People don’t usually have time to read a long sales pitch in the form of an essay in a business setting.

For the sake of simplicity, using sophisticated words is not recommended either – they put people off.

Keep it concise and easy to understand, don’t try to sound smart. You’re offering services or selling a product, so you should speak like a salesman, not a philosophy professor.

As Lynsey Beck, an editor at TopAustraliaWriters suggests:

Take a look at this email from Adobe Creative Cloud. It’s short and simple, yet highly readable. Even a person not related to video production and photo editing can easily understand that the company’s new products offer some cool features.

Screen Capture of a Short, Concise Email,

It also wouldn’t hurt to have a look at cold email templates for ideas.

Work out some guidelines based on other people’s emails so you can write yours following an organized structure.

You don’t want to bore or confuse your recipients – make things readable and clear for them.

This is an excellent way to create the image of you as a business-oriented person in your potential clients’ head.

Don’t Hesitate To Outsource

Consider seeking the help of professionals in the event you need to write a lot of personalized cold emails and don’t have much time on your hands.

Email copywriting is a science after all. So, if you don’t have the time to study it, you can look into hiring a writer that has demonstrable experience and a long list of satisfied customers on sites such as Fiverr, Upwork, and Freelancer.

These sites collect testimonials and reviews on writers so that you don’t have to gamble with quality.

If you don’t want to write your own emails, here are two places you can get pre-written emails:

Buy a proven and tested email series (affordable option)
Hire the best email writer in the business (expensive option)

Market To The Person, Then The Company

Whoever receives your email is an individual, same as you. They have feelings, ambitions, and desires.

You want to appeal to them on a personal level using these things.

Try to convince them that there’s something for them to get out of the deal if they take it to their superiors; perhaps a promotion or a bonus to their salary.

Your primary goal is to motivate the receiver to act upon fast decisions.

Heresy has published an exhaustive article on the importance of stimulating emotions when writing cold emails.

Slow decisions result from a prospect taking time to think about your offer. While fast decisions are made based on emotion and previous experience.

How Do I Use That In Emails?

Here are some examples:

“It will help your company secure more lucrative future deals in this business sector.”
“This opportunity will increase your company’s productivity by 25% this quarter.”
“You can sell this exclusive product to your competitors at twice the rate we’re offering by the end of the week”

Sometimes one person, an ordinary employee answering emails, is all that stands between you and a closed deal. So it can be imperative to find the right approach to them. You need to understand that they’re probably swamped, and your email is but one among hundreds of others they’ve gone through today.

— emphasizes Millie Mac, a digital marketer at Best Writers Canada.

In Conclusion

Using people’s fear of missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime deal, you can drive your sales through the roof.

Market your product as exclusive and limited, create a sense of scarcity.

Adding countdown timers to sales pages is proven to increase sales. When people can see time is running out, it crystalizes that idea in their minds and they’re more likely to take action as a result.

Tools like Commission Gorilla, Landing Page Monkey and Clickfunnels® all make it easy to add timers and other scarcity elements to your sales, landing and squeeze pages.

You want to give the impression that you’re a business-oriented and time efficient person. This will help your potential partners take you seriously and consider your offer more carefully.

Find the right words. Address the email to the person who will be reading it. There are arguments in email marketing circles as to whether personalising emails makes a difference to response rates or not. You can always test both options on your list (assuming you’ve captured their names along with their email addresses).

If your prospect is a company employee, address the email to them personally and not to the company. Play on their career ambitions or devotion to the company.