by Summer Worsley
                                   
Neuro-linguistic Programming and Digital Marketing: Pseudoscience or Is There Something Behind It? 

Over the past couple of years, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) seems to have been co-opted by a number of digital marketing gurus. It’s only fair to ask: is it a pseudoscience or is there something behind it? In this post, we’ll examine what NPL is, how it is being used in digital marketing, and how it differs from common rhetorical tactics such as presupposition and implicature.
 
What is NLP? 

According to the Linguistic Society of America, neurolinguistics is “the study of how language is represented in the brain”. This fascinating area of study is intertwined with cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics as it looks at how and where our brains store knowledge of languages and what happens when we acquire new knowledge.
 
The term ‘neuro-linguistic programming’ (NLP) was coined by University of California psychologists John Grinder and Richard Bandler as a way of describing how our thinking processes (neuro) and language (linguistic) can affect our behavior (programming). While neurolinguistics does overlap with NLP, the latter places an emphasis on how language can affect our body and our behavior.
 
Is NLP a pseudoscience? 

That’s a legitimate question to ask. After all, some of NLP’s biggest proponents, such as professional pick up artist Neil Strauss, have limited scientific credibility and a worryingly relaxed attitude towards ethics. Applying NLP principles to influence who people choose to date (as in the case of Strauss’ book ‘The Game’) has proved highly controversial. However, much of the scientific research backing NLP is legitimate.
 
Why NLP has been co-opted by digital marketing gurus 

The goal of all marketing and sales efforts is to influence people’s decisions and communicate a message more effectively to a target audience. It’s little surprise, therefore, that NLP has been seized upon as the missing piece of the digital marketing puzzle that might help train salespeople, copywriters, and marketers alike.
 
NLP is not only great for motivating people, it also fosters an atmosphere of positive thinking. Salespeople exposed to NLP ideology are therefore more likely to sharpen the same skill sets that might lead to positive results, regardless of whether NLP techniques work.
 
Do NLP techniques work? 

Yes. Most NLP techniques are backed by solid amounts of scientific data. One of the most studied techniques is ‘framing’, which holds that wording a given statement in a positive light is far more likely to generate positive responses. As UC Berkeley professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science George Lakoff observed, “The choice of language is … vital because language evokes frames — moral and conceptual frames.”
 
The evidence shows that this NLP technique works. When one study asked participants to choose between ground meat that was ’75 per cent lean’ and another meat that was ’25 per cent fat’, most people chose the lean option despite both types of meat being essentially identical.
 
When it comes to marketing, framing helps significantly. Michael Aagaard was able to dramatically increase signup numbers for a gambling website (bettingexpert.com) by framing headlines more positively. He found that headlines featuring the phrase ‘Make more money’ were 40 per cent more effective than alternative headlines promising readers that they would ‘Lose less money’, despite both options offering the exact same betting tips and advice.
 
Sometimes negative framing works well too 

While these two examples (as well as other studies) support the NLP principle that positively framed statements and headlines can work wonders for salespeople looking to convert, there’s also evidence that highlights the power of loss aversion, too. For instance, this study found that 61 per cent of women in a group who were shown a negatively framed video about breast cancer signed up for a mammogram. This was significantly more than the 51 per cent of women in another group who were shown a positively framed video.
 
Unfortunately, NLP doesn’t offer a cut and dry answer about which approach is best for a particular product, company or individual. Finding the right approach takes considerable amounts of research and testing.
 
How does NLP differ from common rhetorical tactics such as presupposition and implicature? 
​
Some NLP tactics are borrowed from established rhetorical tactics that have been in common use since antiquity. A good example of this would be increasing the persuasiveness of text through the use of presuppositions. Many digital marketing gurus suggest this approach as a way of using NLP to maximize the impact of a text on its intended audience.
 
One well-known example of presuppositions in use was the notorious Protein World advert in the UK which featured an impossibly slim bikini-clad model next to the question; “Are you beach body ready?” The advert was roundly condemned as being sexist and generated a fair number of complaints, but its text was essentially a type of loaded question known as a presupposition.
 
According to the linguistic branch of pragmatics, presuppositions make an implicit assumption necessary for completing a thought, questions or statement. So, in the question, “Are you beach body ready?” the advert is implying that the viewer is headed to the beach and is likely to want to wear a bikini. It is also a good example of implicature as it implies that only those with slim bodies are able to wear bikinis.
 
This seems like a trivial technique, but it’s a powerful way of influencing the way that people remember adverts and marketing copy. Presuppositions and implicature are a good example of the way that NLP techniques borrow from established rhetorical tools.
 
While there is a significant body of evidence supporting the effectiveness of NLP techniques, there are clear similarities between some NLP techniques and established rhetorical tactics that copywriters have long used to influence readers’ decisions. NLP is more than pseudoscience and there is clearly something behind it, but when it comes to putting NLP techniques into practice, a solid knowledge of commonly used rhetorical devices will stand you in good stead.   
​

by Samuel Gitukui

With over 3.7 billion emails users, and growing, a business can really put its name and brand out there to potential customers using email. However, it’s not just about sending a promotional message as we’ve seen throughout this post.

People are receiving tons of emails every day that clicking the delete or spam button is almost a reflex. So how do you make your email stand out? There are a few things that you can do to succeed at your first email marketing campaign. Let’s find out.

Have an email list

Of course, you will need people to send all those promotional messages to and that means putting in the time and effort to build your email marketing list.

This allows you to access plenty of qualified leads.

The question now becomes, how do you get people to sign up to your email list?

One proven way is to use a non-intrusive pop up whenever someone opens a page on your website. You can provide an incentive to encourage users into signing up such as a discount or a free present. An email list is one of the main elements of a successful email marketing campaign.

Pick a good and reliable email marketing service provider

It’s now time to get your campaign on track. It is never advisable to use Gmail or Outlook. You will need an email marketing service provider such as convert Kid, Mailchimp, or Constant Contact. These will provide you with plenty of benefits.

Some of these benefits include being able to send bulk emails, using customizable email templates and access to campaign management techniques.

Set goals for your campaign

Before you can even create those emails and send them, one thing you will need to do is understand why you are sending the emails in the first place. Sending emails without focus or goals will only end up confusing the readers.

An example of the goals for your email marketing campaign would be upselling, promoting products, getting people to read your blogs, educating readers about the products.

Keep in mind that the ‘why’, is only a part of the goals, you will also need to define the ‘whom’. You may be sending the campaign to repeat customers, to first time customers or to potential customers who have never bought a product from you.

Defining your goals will help you create the right email.

Crafting the email

Now its time to get to the meat of it. You will need to craft the right email and this will start with a catchy subject line that will grab your readers attention and excite them into opening the email.

Once in, they should find attractive images and attractive font.

The message should be sweet, short and straight to the point. The last thing a reader want are lengthy texts.

Once you have these three things in order, it’s time to press the send button. You can then analyze the response rate by checking the opening rate of the website, blog or conversion rate.

How to avoid sending spamming messages

One of the most important ways for businesses to market themselves is through email. It follows then that it can be quite the challenge when you are suddenly blocked as a spammer.

Getting out here could be a nightmare for many businesses. There is a huge battle going on. That between internet service providers and spammers. In fact, statistics show that up to ¼ of all business emails will never get to the recipient’s inbox.

This is because the email is either blocked or marked as spam.

Many who are just beginning at email marketing will often get the short end of the stick. They start off completely wrong sending as many emails as they can and hoping that some will receive a click to buy.

Instead what ends up happening is those emails will hit the spam folder or get blocked all together.

What’s even more ironic is that some companies will send few emails, trying to avoid being marked as spammers which then reduces the chances of reaching even more prospective customers. However, by following a few steps you can increase your odds of making those conversions and preventing your emails from ever going to the spam folder or being blocked.

1.      Work on your reputation

Once upon a time there were spam filters that could check emails and punish you for sending messages that were spammy. However, there is a general consensus among most experts that a business’s reputation is more important.

Just like you can have a lot of trouble getting credit due to a bad credit score, you can also get a bad sender score for your domain name. This can cause your emails not to reach your recipients inboxes.

Whether its Gmail, Hotmail, or yahoo, ISPs have their own strategies and algorithms for determining the senders score. The main one is the complaints by the users when many users click on the spam box on your emails. 

For most ISPs if you receive the spam button by more than a thousand users you will end up having your emails blocked.

And things only go downhill from here. Trying to get out of the spam folder is going to be very difficult.

What you need to start doing is to check whether you are liked or whether most recipients simply don’t like your emails. By using services such as senders.org, you can add your IP address and quickly see your senders score.

What’s more is that you will be able to tell where the problem is coming from and fix it.

2.      Always use clean lists

If say you have a shoddy email list, you are going to get punished by your ISP. One of the things that you will definitely need to avoid are buying lists as they often come with spam traps which are only fake addresses put there to trap spam messages.

They also include the addresses of those that do not want to receive emails. These are more likely going to complain and cause your senders score to decline fast.

While it will most likely take a considerable amount of time, you will benefit from creating your own list of real email subscribers who are willing to receive the emails that you are going to send to them. In fact, as you ask your customers for their emails, you want to make sure that you ask them what kind of emails that they would like to get from you.

If they agree to subscribe to a newsletter for example but make it clear that they do not want marketing content, always ensure that you avoid sending them content that they did not ask for. Otherwise you would only serve to bring down your business reputation.

Also, it is a good idea to separate your list according to the type of customers. This will make it easier for you to send your emails according to what the subscribers want.

Yet another thing that you want to make sure that you do is maintain good email hygiene. You can do this by removing emails from the list that have a tendency of bouncing or opting out. Also, you can take this a step further by sending emails asking customers if they wish to keep receive those emails. You can then only send emails to those customers that respond.

This is where you will really set yourself apart. Instead of concentrating on having a large email list, you are going to maintain only the high-quality customers on your list.

3.      Get skilled at writing good emails

If there is one thing you should know about spammy content is that it triggers the spam folder only around 17% of the time. This however could be higher if you are just starting out at email marketing and haven’t build a reputation yet.

Sending messages that are not only irrelevant but annoying could cause the recipient to quickly click the spam button. Make sure you target your messages in order to avoid all that and always identify yourself on the from section. The subject line, remember will hit the recipient first so ensure you write a crafty one that grabs interest.

Also, those messages should appear the right way on mobile phones as well as on PCs.

4.      Don’t hesitate to hire help

The one thing about sending business emails is that you will indeed benefit from sending many of them as long as you are sending the right type of email. If for example you were to send over 30,000 emails each month, your ISP would be able to tell whether or not you are legitimate.

But not all businesses can send that volume of emails. In this case, it’s a good idea to team up with other smaller businesses. Make sure you share the servers. You can boost your sender score in this way helping you to manage your email list and ensuring that you avoid some of the common pitfalls that trap many in email marketing that we’ve mentioned above.

As an email marketer its absolutely crucial to understand the main parts of an email.

Understanding the 4 main parts of an email

Billions of emails are sent each day. Why? Because emails just so happen to be the most important form of communication especially in business.

Simply put emails are not going anywhere and for you to be effective at writing business emails, you need to understand its main components.

If you are at that point where people are not responding to the emails that you send them, then there has to be something that you are simply doing wrong.

Let’s find out some simple yet effective tip on writing your emails.

1.      The subject line

This is something that you will come across often when it comes to business emails. It is the number one factor that will cause your email to either be read tor deleted.

Getting it the wrong way can cause it to be sent directly to the junk box. Other than being truthful and informative, the subject line needs to capture the reader’s attention, and make them curious as to what is contained in the email.

What this means is to create a feel of curiosity in the minds of the reader. If both the subject line and the email are talking about two different things then the reader will end up with a bad impression of your business.

2.      The email salutation

How you begin your email will create the tone that you are going to use throughout your email. These first few lines are where the reader will get a feel of what you are offering and will decide whether to continue reading or to completely ignore the rest of the email.

You definitely want to avoid appearing too formal or too impersonal. If you know the name of the person you are writing to, start by addressing them directly by their name.

On the other hand, if you do not know the name, start off with Hi, instead of using terms like “to whom it may concern”. What you should always keep in mind is that in business when trying to create good customer relations, you want to avoid sounding too formal.

3.      The middle of the email

Nobody likes reading extensively long text. If you are in a situation where you receive many emails every day, the last thing you are going to look at are extensively long emails.  Even if the recipient opens up the email and finds that to find that it is long, he will probably end up closing it and looking at something else.

Nobody is interested in spending more than the required time going through emails. Always make sure that you send only short and clear and straight to the point emails.

4.      The ending

If the recipient decided to read the email right up to the end, you want to make sure that you end it the right way as this will determine the impression that the reader leaves you with.

Ensure that it is clear what, you expect your reader to do but use a polite tone. Such as “I look forward to hearing from you” or “please let me know what you think”.

Then sign off with phrases such as “kind regards” or “many thanks”. Since this is a business email, you want to make sure that you include any relevant LinkedIn, twitter or Facebook accounts and include your name and signature.

Now that you have a clear understanding of email marketing and the different parts of an email, its time to take things to the next level!

If you want to expand your email marketing list, these are the 3 rules you need to break

Coming up with great copy and excellent promotions is one thing, but all that information and all those great offers need to mailed out to someone. If you don’t have anyone to send them to, you are really accomplishing nothing at the end of the day.

The normal procedures of getting people to your mailing list is to take their emails when they make a buy decision or when they register with your website.

Another way is to include a big “subscribe to our mailing list” button whenever they open a blogpost on your website, and granted, these are all methods that have been proven to work.

However, if you really want to take thing a step further from your competition, then you obviously need to figure out a way to do things different and that may mean breaking some of the conventional rules.

These are the 3 rules you should in fact consider breaking to add on to your emailing list.

1.      Avoid using pop ups

A pop up would normally appear when someone has opened a blog post or a page on your website for the first time.
Sometimes when you are trying to read content and a pop up appears, the first instinctive reaction is to close the pop up and try to access the content even without reading what the pop up is saying. If it is requesting you to subscribe to the mailing list, then you still haven’t been impressed by what the company is offering and so you will just close the window.

Instead, it is more beneficial to use pop overs. These work in a similar way to pop ups but will only appear when the reader clicks on two or more webpages.

By now he or she has an understanding of what the business offers and has decided mentally where there or not they would be interested on what is on offer.

Companies that have used this method have seen great improvement on the number of people who subscribe to their mailing list and the fact that the pop overs appear less frequency means that the reader is not annoyed when they do.

2.      Always ask for a double subscription or opt in

It sounds like going through a lot of unnecessary trouble having already received the first subscription but research shows that some customers will actually send an invalid email address because they don’t want their inboxes filled with emails that they are never planning to read.

However, by asking for an email the second time such as when a customer is purchasing a product, you are able to confirm their email address and send relevant content to them.

3.      Provide people with the option to opt pout

Instead of asking people to subscribe to your mailing list, you can actually ask them to opt out. This allows them control to decide whether they actually want this.

When your business is always popping up the question “would you like to subscribe to our mailing list?” then the reader feels like they are being coaxed into something. Providing the option of opting out gives the reader full control and surprisingly most will often decide to subscribe.

by Samuel Gitukui

When marketing your business through email, you will be sending plenty of these to your customers. However, your prospective customer may just decide to mark it as spam or completely disregard it.  

If your emails are not being read, then your conversions will be low as less people will actually get to see the buy button contained therein. Do you think that you spend too many emails but still your conversions are lagging behind? There are 4 things that you can do to turn things around and increase the number of people that actually read your emails.

This include solving a problem, providing them with interesting content, showing them how to save money or making them much smarter buyers.

1.      Helping your customers solve a problem

Imagine that you had a problem and a certain website convinced you that the content they would send would help you solve such problems. How willing would you be at subscribing to their newsletter? You would be very much willing, wouldn’t you?

Part of creating great content to send to your readers is understanding their problems and helping them solve those problem. Once your readers see that you are actually doing this, they are much more likely to open the emails that you send to them.

This strategy has been showed to have a huge effect on conversions with an opening rate of between 50 to 70 percent. The average opening rate for emails is 25.6%.

2.      Saving customers money

If there is one thing we all love is to purchase that item we’ve been wanting for so long time at a discount. Whether it’s that restaurant meal or that microwave, any chance to purchase a product at less than the stated price always seems to grab people’s attention.

Because of realizing this fact smart businesses will include promotions in their subject lines and include words like, promotion, save, sale, or even free shipping. This makes it that much easier for the customer to understand what is ono offer.

As you probably already know, the subject line is what the customer reads first before opening the email.

3.      Make them learn something, make them smarter

Many people embrace having more knowledge on a particular subject area. If you are in business, then you obviously want to know how to increase your conversions.

If you had a source of reading important business concepts, then you would want to subscribe and open their emails to learn more about turning yourself into a great business person.

Instead of focusing on always selling a product, sometimes you may just want to inform your readers on a particular topic of interest to them.

4.      Source of Entertainment

Perhaps one of the best ways to grab someone’s attention is to entertain them. People love a good laugh and if you can send regular blog posts that make them reach a point of bless then you can seriously increase your opening rate.

Try to include a fun blogpost and then include a promotional message somewhere in the text.