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How To Get Your Customers To Buy Using Buyer Psychology In Email Marketing

Do you want to make more sales from your emails? We know how. And that's by using buyer psychology in email marketing to your customers to buy from you again and again.  

Ready to find out our best-kept secrets?

(They're not really secrets by the way – we're more than happy to share so you can take your business to the next level!)

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:15) Join our FREE Facebook Group. 
(4:41) What actually is buyer psychology?
(9:17) People's beliefs impact the way they buy.
(13:55) Other factors that impact the buyer's psychology.
(21:45) Use stories in your email marketing. 
(26:49) Talk to your audience as if they were already customers. 
(29:32) Train your subscribers to click. 
(32:21) Share social proof (and sell hope).
(36:07) Use urgency in your emails.
(39:17) Subject line of the week.

What actually is buyer psychology? 

Psychology is a huge part of what we do – it’s at the core of our work and frameworks. The idea here is to get people to buy based on what they think and feel about something. Because thoughts and feelings affect how people buy things. 

What we experience over the course of our lives leads us to who we are today, which is why two people may feel differently about the same set of circumstances. That's what makes us the humans we are. And this concept also rolls over into the process of buying. You might have two people who are demographically identical but who are psychologically very different and think differently about a lot of things. Just like us two, for example, which is why we tend to buy things for very different reasons! 

People's beliefs impact the way they buy

One of the things that impact how people buy is what previous experience they have with what you sell. If they’ve been ripped off by someone else in your niche, or if they’ve failed before, that's going to influence what (and if) they buy. So in our case for example, we know we have to do things to make sure we show that our approach is very different – it’s no bullshit and straight to the point. It’s open and honest.

When people have beliefs or previous experience with someone in the same industry, they might approach your product or service with misconceptions. For example, a lot of people who already do email marketing don't think they need to hear anything new from us, so they'll immediately put their walls up. But our approach is completely different!

The point is that someone's beliefs about what you sell and what you do affect their ability to buy. Do they believe you're trustworthy or that your process will work? Do they think you have their best interests at heart?

What beliefs do people hold about themselves? 

On top of that, you also need to take into account the beliefs that people have about themselves. They might believe your programme works, but will it work for them? They might question this because maybe they tried something similar in the past and failed. The beliefs they have about themselves can contribute to buying or can stop them from buying. 

The psychology around how people buy isn’t all positive or all negative. But it’s something you can definitely tap into to fuel people’s decisions. Because not only do people have beliefs about you and what you sell but also self-imposed beliefs about themselves. So if someone thinks they can only succeed through accountability, for example, your job is to tell them your programme has an element of accountability.

Don’t try and fight people’s beliefs – instead, try to build on them. Sure, sometimes you'll have to change someone’s belief (and there are ways of doing that). But the best and most persuasive way of doing anything is to build on the beliefs that are positively going to help you to move people forward.

Other factors that impact buyer's psychology

You also need to factor in that people worry about what others think about them, which is a multi-layered concept because you have 1) what others think and 2) what people think others think about them! And those are two different things. For example, if you’re out walking your dog, you may think that other dog owners judge you for something your dog did. Or that maybe they feel sorry for you. But that's what you think is going on. You can’t be sure of someone else's thoughts and feelings.

A similar thing happens around status. Some people buy certain things because they think it’s going to give them a certain status. And for some people that will be the case. But others will think the exact opposite – that the thing you have is not cool at all!

And this goes for both expensive and inexpensive things. Someone might think that if you paid very little for something, you got a great bargain. Others will think that paying so little makes you cheap! So you can position pretty much anything based on someone’s beliefs.

Thoughts vs beliefs

What's interesting here is that we're talking about two separate things at once – thoughts and beliefs. Beliefs are built over time, long-held, and hard to change whereas thoughts are fleeting, passing moments. Beliefs are ultimately built from thoughts, but they are different things.

And sometimes your thoughts will conflict with your beliefs. Someone may have a thought about something for a period of time that conflicts massively with their core beliefs and makes them confused. And this confusion could ultimately stop them from buying. Over time, if you have enough of those conflicting thoughts, it will change what your belief is.

This is why it's always worth taking a moment to rationalise a thought against your beliefs to see if that thought still stands. People change over time, so it's good to question things. And sometimes when you’re trying to sell something, you’re playing with people’s fleeting thoughts in the moment. They might be having an emotionally driven day and charged thoughts right now, but their overall beliefs are different. And sometimes you may be able to temporarily bypass some of their long-term beliefs if you lean on those more fleeting thoughts.

How do we use psychology in our email marketing?

1. Use stories in your email marketing

So how do we use buyer psychology in our email marketing? The simplest way is by using stories. Writing stories in your emails allows you to immediately connect emotionally with people rather than giving lists of facts. When you’re talking about personal stories and anecdotes, you’re building trust with people. They imagine things happening – they can picture the outcomes and results you share about your clients, for example. And when we imagine stories, we tend to put ourselves in the first person and imagine what that would look like for us.

Want to know how you can easily turn a bunch of facts into a story? Add a location to it. You can do really casually. So, for example, if you mention the kitchen tap was dripping, we know you’re in a kitchen – you don't have to tell us.

And sometimes the details you share can also be open to interpretation. If you mention you got married, for example, people’s minds will go to all sorts of different settings. And that’s powerful in itself, because when you start giving too many details, you may not be adding anything. But if you leave something open, you help paint a picture of what that means to them.

Examples of techniques you can use in your stories

To make them effective, in your stories use techniques such as future pacing and helping people imagine an outcome by sharing someone else’s. Build rapport with your audience by telling stories about when you were vulnerable or when you showed weakness. At times, we may share stories of something we did brilliantly, but more often than not, if you talk about the times you made mistakes or struggled, it makes your story more interesting, and it allows you to build rapport and trust.

Also, use stories to interrupt the pattern and grab people’s attention. Pattern interrupt stories are really powerful, especially if you share stories that are unexpected – of a time when you failed or when you did something out of the box, for example. You make things interesting and relatable.

Plus, stories are brilliant for indirect persuasion, rather than offensive persuasion. There’s a difference between telling people and sharing a story that makes them see how they could do something. Now they’re suddenly in agreement because they’re not being attacked with your truth – you’re not running after them trying to make them believe something. Instead, you’re telling them a story so they’re relaxed while listening. And that allows them to consider things in a way plain old facts can’t.

So show, not tell. Because people want to decide for themselves, and applying storytelling to your emails makes your emails really persuasive.

2. Talk to your audience as if they were already customers

Another thing we do is to assume that people are already customers. For example, we speak to our audience collectively as if they were a customer of our membership The League. We’ll talk about things we do inside our membership even to people who aren't members yet – we imply that everyone is a customer already.

Why do we address everyone in a presumptive manner, assuming they’re already customers? Partly to build this feeling that everyone who’s in our audience is a customer already. It's not a belief, but it's definitely a feeling that tells you that you need to join too because everyone else is doing it. By doing this, we make people feel like they've already taken the first step. And as we all know, the first step is always the hardest! 

The Top 10 Books To 'Power Up' Your Email Marketing

10 book recommendations that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we stumbled upon which have been game-changing for us).

3. Train your subscribers to click

Another thing we do is to train our subscribers to click. Why? Because if people aren’t clicking the links in your emails, they can’t go to your sales pages and buy. So you have to train them to click, especially if they’re not used to it. We do this by adding a link in all emails and giving people a reason to click. 

We know a lot of you have already downloaded our free resource called Click Tricks, which shares different ways to encourage your subscribers to click on your links without always using the same phrase. This matters because if you do the same thing over and over, people become blind to it. So you need to come up with new, fresh, and innovative ideas for people to click that are exciting and interesting. One of the ways we do this, for example, is by encouraging people to click on a link to vote between a few options. It's unusual, and it's part of our training behaviour, which is key to buyer psychology.

When you think about it, every large organisation (such as supermarkets, for example) studies the psychology of how people behave in their environments. In our case, we operate in an online environment, so we need to know how people behave. And they will only open emails and click on links if you train them to do so.

In order to do this successfully, you need to start doing it from day one and be consistent because you can't train this behaviour retrospectively after you've lost engagement. We try and regain engagement with our LOL Revival sequence, but it's hard to get engagement back. And if your open rates are high but your click rate isn’t, it’s probably because you haven’t given your subscribers enough links or reasons to click. You lost that behaviour before you even gained it.

4. Share social proof (and sell hope)

Another thing we do with buyer psychology is to evoke the feeling that everyone else has been successful with what we sell, which means you have a good chance of being successful with it too. That feeling of hope is what makes people buy. We’re selling the psychology of hope that you can be successful and get results from working with us. 

Hope is a feeling – not a belief. Focus on selling hope and start to integrate it into your marketing. Because once people buy hope, they'll believe there's a chance that success is possible. But ultimately, hope is an inspiring, uplifting feeling that comes from your stomach and not your brain.

So how do you create a feeling of hope? By sharing stories of customer wins. We do this by including screenshots in our emails of comments that people leave us. This is proof that others are using our methods and getting results. Remember to never make claims you can't prove though – always tell the story and make a promise that you can back up. We live in a world that’s more sceptical than ever, so make a statement and then weave into the proof immediately. Because by doing that, you’re training the audience to believe that you tell the truth. 

5. Use urgency in your emails

And finally, another way to tap into buyer psychology is to use urgency in your email marketing. As human beings, we live in a world where we’re constantly monitoring the priorities of things we have to pay attention to. Your job is to move what you do to the top of people’s priority list. Because if it’s not at the top of their priorities, it won’t get done.

If you send out a video and want people to consume it, for example, say it's only available until tomorrow. That’s a simple way to add some urgency and make sure people move watching your video to the top of their priority list. Because if not, they’ll do something else. Urgency works because it’s about moving people’s priorities – it's the reason to pay attention now.

If you want to know more about urgency, we’ve talked about it in other episodes, so go and check them out: 

How To Get People To Buy Your Product Now – 2 Ways To Create Urgency.

How to Create Urgency For an Evergreen Membership or Course Without Product Launches.

And How to Do Deadlines Well and Ethically.

If you want to apply all this without even thinking about it, it’s already baked into the campaigns, frameworks, and systems that we give you inside our membership The League. So go and check it out!

GET THE EMAIL HERO BLUEPRINT

Make More Sales with our cutting-edge Psychology-Based Email Marketing Programme

  • Psychology-based email marketing.
  • 45+ Email Campaigns.
  • Video Campaign Workshops.
  • Growing Library of Video Trainings.


Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “This podcast ep is out of date”. We used the word “ep” instead of “episode” to make it sound more conversational, but what makes this subject line interesting is the fact that it takes a negative idea (the concept of ‘being out of date') and turns it into a positive.

What this email was all about is the fact that our member Brad Brown (who we interviewed in a previous episode) had an overly positive outcome – he made more money using our campaigns than he'd made when we recorded the interview with him. And that means the figures we shared in our podcast episode were out of date! 

This is a good example of how to use subject lines to drive open rates but also sales and engagement. So use the idea of something that sounds negative and turn it into a positive. Try it out!  

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Advanced Psychology: Using Compound Curiosity.

The Psychology Of A Successful Email Launch – Being Desirable With Abraham Kallon.

Get Your Emails Opened Using NLP – With Jon Benson.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about selling more by using buyer psychology in email marketing) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player. 

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

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