How To Use Humour In Email Marketing
Any email you send reflects your brand’s personality, while it is important to provide value in your communications, finding a way to appeal to the reader’s emotional, humanistic side is an extremely valuable part of email marketing.
As brand values and tone of voice differ from company to company, there exists a range of emotions which your content strategy can lean into to evoke emotional reactions such as: love, nostalgia, trust and of course humour.
We are bombarded with more and more emails everyday and trying to stand out in the inbox is now harder than ever, but an effective tactic to grab the attention of the reader is to make them laugh or atleast put a smile on their face.
Two main reasons why companies use humour in their email marketing.
- Humour Triggers An Emotional Response: When you write content that evokes emotion and triggers an emotional response your marketing becomes more successful, while the emotion doesn’t specifically have to be humour, a humorous or feel-good reaction from your audience will make them feel closer to your business. Similar to how a funny story or good joke strengthens relationships between friends, family or colleagues the same thing works with consumers and businesses.
- Humour improves brand recall: Humour has been scientifically proven to improve memory recall. Writing humorous and funny content is no easy task but when done successfully, it is more easily remembered compared to other neutral forms of content. Striking a happy balance between humour and value in your content plan will drastically improve your email marketing results.
Tips & Tricks
Know Your Audience: Before you can start incorporating humour into your emails, you need to understand your audience. Who are they? What kind of humour do they appreciate? What are their pain points and challenges? The better you know your audience, the easier it will be to create humorous content that resonates with them.
Make Sure The Humour Is Relevant: To keep the humour appropriate and relevant within your communications there are 3 key factors to remember:
- Your brand personality and nice,
- Your audience
- The reason you are sending the email
Avoid using adult humour or any topical humour that could offend readers. When first starting off incorporating humour its best to start with well-known puns and day to day jokes to test the water something lighthearted that is impossible to be misconstrued.
Go Beyond Fun And Entice The Subscriber To Convert: While humorous emails are useful for developing relationships between brand and customer. The objective of 99% of email marketing is to drive conversions. Humour without a purpose is pointless, the key is to use humour in such a way that your subscribers will be entertained and also prompted to make a purchase.
Strike The Balance Between Funny and Professional: Not every email you send has to contain humour, there is a thin line between fun and being unprofessional. As previously mentioned, striking a balance between humorous content and valuable content is key. People will get bored extremely quickly if you keep sending the same type of content (especially if it isn’t funny), leading to people unsubscribing.
Utilise funny people in your team: Every office has a jokester, but there is a big difference between cracking quips in the office and writing genuinely funny, relevant content. If you happen to have one of these individuals in your office then make the most of them. If you don’t happen to have one of these people in your team it may be worth hiring a freelance copywriter.
Wrap Up
By integrating humour into your email marketing strategy you will be able to build deeper better relationships with your customers and form a more emotional connection with them.
In certain industries it may be inappropriate to incorporate comedy/humour into your marketing, if you run a funeral home for example it may not be best practice. However in most industries, injecting some comedy into your client communications is possible.
If you would rather leave it up to the professionals then Inboxx specialises in direct email marketing campaigns for any industry. Our campaigns are designed to get you noticed by the people that matter, boosting your leads.
Contact Inboxx at:
Email: grow@in-boxx.com Phone: 0161 543 4461
