PR prospects are people too and understanding a bit of psychology can help you understand how their brains make decisions. Understanding how the human brain works can help your outreach team make appealing, interesting and engaging pitches. Leveraging psychology research, you can improve your emails to be more powerful and effective.
Here are some psychological tips you can use to help improve your results with PR pitch emails.
1) Appeal to Emotion, Even Before Appealing to Logic
There’s nothing wrong with logical ads—in fact, they must be logical to some degree. If you’re being outlandish or making unfounded claims, your customers are going to see right through it. So, it is important to keep your emails down to earth.
But it is also important to appeal to emotion. In fact, emotional advertisements can exceed the results of logical emails. A recent study showed emotional ads were almost twice as effective than rational ads, as illustrated in this graphic by Neuroscience Marketing.
Create the fear of not buying, appeal to what a person cares about, use compelling imagery – all of these strategies are proven effective in making business development emails successful.
2) Use Social Proof To Add Confidence
People much prefer to work with businesses that have a successful track record, rather than those that are brand new. Show prospects that you have successful worked with other companies by including customer testimonials and glowing reviews in your emails.
Studies have shown that including images of people who recommend your services will help drive home the authenticity and increase confidence in your business. Also consider including photos of awards your business has won or news clippings that report on your business to continue to show a successful business history. Even including the number of customers your business has already served will show a great track record. Finding visuals ways to show success will make a lasting impression and stick with the reader longer than just writing about your awards.
3) Learn What People Want to Hear
There’s an old adage that people love it when you tell them what they want to hear. This can be leveraged in your outreach strategy. While you may want to put together a personalized pitch, it is easy for journalists to get lost in the details. Staying general and stressing a few benefits of your business may provide more clarity. Once you find a successful way to explain your business and the value proposition, use it over and over again on similar audiences. You may even consider sending an appreciation gift to journalists who are considering your pitch.
This is also similar to the verbatim effect, which says that people are more likely to remember the gist of what you say, and not specific details. Rather than go into deep detail in business development emails, promise one or two things, and then say it often. For example, if you sell a CRM system, rather than promising to build visuals reports of potential sales, and help keep sales resources on track, try a simple line like “we save your sales team 5 hours a week”.
If you find an answer or a given response has worked well for you in the past, you can build an automation email sequence that reiterates this simple message to reinforce your business. Automation and templates are great solutions for taking something that has worked and putting it to work for you again.
4) Add a Splash of Color
In the same way emotions can be more appealing than logic, colorful presentations can be more appealing than a sea of black and white. When used effectively, color theory can be a powerful email tool in business development.
Studies have shown that up to 90% of a email recipient’s first impression is based on color and visual cues alone. Make sure your visuals and colors are conveying the emotions you want.
Use images, gifs and email design to bring color and clarity into your business development emails. Make sure buttons or forms leverage colors to show a clear CTA and drive clicks.
5) Remember, Context Matters as Much as Content
It’s not all about what you’re mentioning in your emails, but how you’re mentioning them. Framing refers to the process of defining the context around an issue or problem as framing.
When you’re framing something in the right way, you’re much more likely to get a response. For example, if you’re selling a vacation package, you don’t want to talk about the big costs associated with it – you want to delve into the details of the destination and why it’s a can’t-miss opportunity.
Framing an email can make or break your business development efforts. Once you know how your recipient is reacting, you can more easily put your next email into context that works.
6) Personalize Emails and Use Thoughtful Imagery
Personalized communications are the best kinds of communications. Sometimes it is as simple as using a recipient’s first name instead of their full name, whereas other times it can involve getting a bit more artistic with your presentation.
With Mixmax, you can input images right into the body of your email without worrying about any formatting problems. Using mail merge functionality you can add first names and business names to mass emails to allow for personalization while still allowing for email automation.
You can also set rules for your email marketing, such as how to respond to someone who hasn’t responded in a while, or how to merge certain contacts into one group for smarter email automation.
The Psychology of Communication and Business
The good news is that you don’t need a degree in psychology in order to use email marketing psychology. In a world where the average person only spends 11 seconds on an email, leveraging emotional arguments, visuals and color, and personalization can make a lasting effect. By using framing and social proof, you can also make a compelling argument for your business. Understanding how the human brain works can help increase open rates, see higher response rates, and also lead to better customer relationships.
