Some of you may know that I also have a podcast. We’ve begun a new feature on the podcast where people write in about their problems. A podcast listener asked me how to increase the response rates to their email campaigns. Since email response is an issue many of you are dealing with, I thought I would share how you can use the behavioral sciences to increase your response rates.

Most of us do not take the time to write and edit and optimize our email campaign hoping that our customers will ignore it. You want people to do something after they read it.

If the response rate is poor, meaning few customers do what you wanted them to, the email fails.

The behavioral sciences present us with a couple of different theoretical approaches that can help us figure out what could be going on here. The first is Framing or the idea that information emphasizes some parts of the message more than others. The second is Loss Aversion, which is the concept that describes how people hate losing things more than they feel good gaining things. Let’s take a closer look at how each of these applies to email communication.

read more…