So, when is humor a good idea for your email marketing campaigns? Well, individual email campaigns may help define that for you, but otherwise…here’s a good place to start. You may consider using humor if:

1. Your branding is on the casual side
2. Visitors who click thru to your site will have a similar experience
3. The products you are promoting are lacking excitement
4. You’re looking to maintain a solid email subscriber following & reduce un-subscribes

So what are the benefits of using humor in your emails?

1. Humor is memorable
2. Humor is “share” worthy. By that I mean, a humorous email is more likely to be spoken about and shared with others as opposed to a dry email pushing products.
3. Positive Branding. Humor gives you the opportunity to connect with your audience on a more personal level – an opportunity to show your customers that you’re in tune with everyday life and that you’re not simply another company trying to force buying on them.
4. Retention. If you’re noticing a lot of your email subscribers stick around for a while but eventually un-subcrbe…one reason may be that they simply have no reason to keep accepting your emails. Using humor now and then gives them more incentive to stay subscribed – cuz let’s face it – sending emails with product after product can only be effective for so long. Alternatively, everybody likes to laugh.

Looking at this reasoning, think of a Super Bowl ad. Is it surprising that Fortune 500 companies spend millions of dollars to air funny commercials? Do you remember or even look forward to Super Bowl ads? Have you ever talked about them with your friends? If so, how many of them were funny ads as opposed to serious ads? My guess is, the vast majority.

So how do you use humor?

The possibilities are really endless – it’s just a matter of spending a little time to put your creative hat on.

Here’s an example.

This email blast was designed to feature a number of products offered through and ecommerce store. As opposed to simply stating the purpose of the product and what it can be used for in a traditional sense, we decided to accompany an “innovative” purpose along with it.

What you’re looking at is an example of how one of these products was positioned. A relatively unexciting product used to automatically open plane doors was compared to the entry way door from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”.

Now is this side splitting? Probably not. But it’s a lot more memorable than a product image with some bullet point specs.

I had a colleague pick some random product images to write short one-liners on. Again, are people going to be rolling on the floor laughing….probably not. But this took literally 2 minutes to do – and already it’s more appealing.

Overall, using humor within your email marketing campaigns can have a number of benefits. It’s not something you have to do every time you send an email out, but once and a while – a little humor can go a long way toward bringing a little life and effectiveness to your efforts.

That bring us to the end of today’s video, I hope you all enjoyed it. If you’d like to learn more about how Exclusive Concepts can help with YOUR email marketing efforts, give us a call at 800-504-4324.

Thanks again and enjoy the rest of your day!