Chances are that you’re creating email without a full understanding of your audience’s behaviors and preferences. But real value is created when we fully understand who we’re emailing at a psychological level. By applying different principles from psychology and marketing to email—including personality types and cognitive biases—we can craft more compelling, high-performing campaigns that drive engagement with your audience.

1. Using Psychology to Create
High-Performance Emails

2. Jonathan Pay
Consultant, Holistic Email Marketing
@jonathanpay
@HolisticEmail
jonathan@holisticemail.com
www.holisticemail.com

4. Helpful marketing

5. First, change YOUR mindset

6. 67% of brands with campaigns that were above their own
average score achieved higher read rates than those
campaigns that scored lower than the average for that brand.
Of the 67% of brands that were found to have an increased
read-rate, we found it could increase from between 102%
and 468%.

7. Be helpful, not manipulative

8. Customer-centric
Helpful Marketing

9. “If you’re trying to persuade people to do
something, or buy something, it seems to
me you should use their language, the
language they use every day, the language
in which they think”
David Ogilvy

10. Why be customer-centric?
“What’s in it for me?” Features to benefits.
400% uplift CRT
marketingexperiments.com

11. Personalities
By addressing the following, you’re personalising your emails without
complex segmentation or dynamic content.

12. 4 basic web users
Hippocrates’s humours:
sanguine (spontaneous)
choleric (competitive)
melancholic (methodical)
phlegmatic (humanistic)
Jakob Nielsen:
tool dominant
search dominant
navigation dominant
successful

13. Competitive Spontaneous
Methodical Humanistic
Fast
Slow
Logical Emotional

14. WHAT type questions
What are your competitive advantages?
What makes you the superior choice?
What makes you a credible company?
What can you do to help make me look cutting edge?
What are your credentials?
What can you do to help me achieve my goals?
WHY/WHEN type questions
How can you get me to what I need quickly?
Do you offer superior service?
Can I customise your product or service?
Can you help me narrow down my choices?
How quickly can I take action and achieve my goals?
Why will this let me enjoy life more?
HOW type questions
What's the fine print?
How does this work?
How can I plan ahead?
What proof do you have?
Can you guarantee that?
WHO type questions
How will your product or service make me feel?
Who uses your products/services?
Who are you? Who is on your staff and let me see bios
What will it feel like to work with you?
What experience have others had with you?
Can I trust you?
What are your values?

15. Design for personalities

16. Cognitive Biases &
Heuristics
Helping your customer make their decision by leveraging the
unconscious decision-making shortcuts we all innately create.

17. “By associating the feelings of pain and pleasure
with people, places, and events, we learn to
safely make our way in the world.”
Trevor van Gorp, Edie Adams, Design for
Emotion

18. ”The rational mind is the humble servant, the intuitive
mind is the faithful gift. We have created a society that
honours the servant, and has forgotten the gift.”
Albert Einstein
”Research shows 95% of purchasing decisions are
subconscious.”
Gerald Zaltman, How Customers Think: Essential
Insights into the Mind of the Market

19. Persuasion Architecture
Help by providing a clearly signposted pathway for customers
to follow.
Think about the psychological cues that prompt action.
Consider the entire customer journey, from email to landing
page to sale.

20. Cognitive Ease
“A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as
physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways
of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to
the least demanding course of action…
Laziness is built deep into our nature”
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

21. Status quo/default bias

22. Primacy & Recency
Primacy:
Things that happen first are
typically the most important
because they influence what
comes next. This results in
greater recall.
Recency:
Things that just happened are
relevant because they’re the
most accurate representation of
“now”.

24. Distinctiveness - von Restorff Effect

26. Social Proof
People will follow the Wisdom of the crowd. This can take
many forms:
• Reviews/Testimonials.
• Share your numbers (as long as they’re worth sharing!).
• Ratings.
• Name dropping.

28. NakedWines.com

30. Reciprocity
Use as a part of the sign up process. Give something to get
something.

33. Scarcity, Loss Aversion, Urgency
Scarcity: The more difficult it is to acquire an item, the more
value it is perceived to have.
Loss Aversion: There are two main drivers in us all; to gain
pleasure, and to avoid pain. We strongly prefer to avoid losses
than to acquire gains.
Urgency: This can tie both scarcity and loss aversion together.

34. edatasource.com

35. Test, test, test!

36. www.holisticemail.com
hello@holisticemail.com
@holisticemail