One of the biggest challenges for a marketer is to get your reader to open your email. Or to take action, which can even be to respond to your note.
The subject line becomes the most important tool for opening your email.
The content you put out become critical in nudging action.
Here are 3 psychological techniques that will get your reader to act. You can use these for cold-call emails, reaching a potential client or a prospective hiring manager. These never fail!
Arouse Curiosity:
You may have seen lists of pictures on online portals such as Yahoo. Typically, they go like this: “30 Incredibly Fantastic Picnic Pictures – No.15 is Unbelievable”.
The result is the reader not only clicks on the link, but scrolls through the list, spending time on your site and boosting page rank.
Or something like this:
You really want to what Cage lied about, don’t you?
Obviously, your content has to back up your claim. Else you will lose your reader.
Appeal to their Ego:
I was not getting responses from this service provider for a while. Every time it was stalling. Until, I write this one sentence after making a request.
“With a team as skilled as yours, I find it hard to believe that the issue is still unresolved after more than 3 weeks”.
Very quickly, they scheduled a call and the issue was resolved in a couple days.
The reason: the sentence appealed to their ego. Flattery (the sincere type) and appealing to someone’s ego can get you results.
Use this technique judiciously.
Fear of loss:
Studies have established that people respond more quickly to the fear of losing something that they already have, than to the appeal of fresh gains.
When you book an airline ticket or a hotel room online, you are offered, at the very end, the option of insuring your purchase.
There is a small box you have to check to indicate whether you want to opt for purchasing insurance or declining the insurance offer.
The text for the decline has evolved. Ordinarily, I would simply click decline and move on to completing the purchase of the ticket or hotel room.
But when it says “No. I am ok with losing my $550 purchase”, then I pause for a second and re-read.
This is the “fear of loss” at play. A great psychological technique in getting you to purchase insurance. Or at least to click and read more. Which gives you a prospective with a more likely intent to buy.
Buying, making decisions or even not buying starts with gut-feel. i.e. psychology at play. Use these techniques and see your writing improve.
At Accelevaite, our guides and courses help you write better and get noticed. Better writing is a sure way to find your next job, get customers to take action and generally have your ideas and thoughts recognized. You can build credibility and a powerful presence online with your writing.
The term “long-tail” comes from statistics. Where there are extreme values, there are fewer data points. The distribution of most data, displayed on a chart, creates the appearance of tapering off at the end; a “tail.”
For each additional keyword added to a keyword phrase, there are a smaller number of people searching for that specific combination of words.
The presence of a long tail for a particular keyword indicates that there is a group of people who are looking for very specific information. This is your target group. These are not casual surfers, but high-potential customers. They could be recruiters in your dream company and you want to write for them.
Targeting long-tail keywords has the following benefits:
Those searching for the long-tail keyword are more likely to be your potential customers.
Search engines can display results more accurately for long-tail keywords.
There is less competition for long-tail keywords.
Your site will stay high in the rankings for a longer time, relative to shorter keywords.
3. Identifying your top keywords:
To identify and gather keywords relevant to your site you must go beyond the obvious:
Identify 3-5 main keywords based on your ecommerce or blog site topic. One of these must be embedded in your domain name, such as Cheaptickets.com.
Use Google suggest (a.k.a. auto complete) and review the keywords indicated by “Searches related to.” You can also use Google Keyword Planner tool or other software in order to add to your list in this manner.
Even better, ask ChatGPT to give you a list of keywords. Then ask it to refine, and then refine some more.
Continue the process until you have 3-5 high potential “core” keywords and about 50 long-tail keywords.
4. Important attributes of the keywords in your target list:
A. Volume: They must have high search volume. This is for the keywords, and also for the search results produced by Google. High volume = more people are searching for this keyword.
B. Relevance: Less relevance means wrong audience. If your content is written for the wrong audience (i.e. targeting keywords will low or no relevance), you won’t get customer interest. For the right audience, you want to put out compelling content.
C. Commerciality: Present of ads in search results indicates that people are willing to pay for the resulting information, i.e. this indicates the presence of a market.
5. What do you do with the keywords:
A. Write content: Obviously you want to write content, compelling content. Blog-posts, white-papers, curated content, stories, etc. All these can provide insightful information to your customer and keep them engaged.
B. Monitor ranking: Monitor the performance of your content against the keywords. This will tell you how your site and content perform and give you a chance to tweak the same, i.e. improve SEO.
C. Write cornerstone posts: For your “core” keywords (the 3-5 that you selected), you want to write longer, more informational posts. Then add multiple hyperlinks to these posts.
D. Ensure keywords are hyperlinked to your other content: Ensure that each of your blog-posts has at least 3-5 links to your own blog-posts. Ensure that you have at least 2 links to external sites. Use keywords to insert the links on. E.g. instead of hyperlinking “click here”, put the hyperlink on “herbal cure for dry cough”.
E. Include in your URLs: Ensure your “core” keywords are in the URL slug.
F. Use advertisements for your keywords: When your competition has all but captured all your top keywords, then use ads for those keywords. Counter-intuitively, you can also place ads for the keywords where your content is ranking high (to ensure you capture maximum value for those keyword searches). Do this when there is sufficient volume of searches.
Keywords are the foundation of search engine results. Targeting the wrong keywords means that your content is invisible to your target customer.
At Accelevaite, our guides and courses help you write better and get noticed. Better writing is a sure way to find your next job, get customers to take action and generally have your ideas and thoughts recognized. You can build credibility and a powerful presence online with your writing.
