Jimmy Kim breaks down six psychological drivers for retention emails: reciprocity, urgency, friction, curiosity, identity, and momentum. A message needs to hit at least one to work, but the best campaigns combine multiple drivers at once.
Every campaign should answer at least one of these psychological questions. So when you're creating a campaign, you should ask yourself these questions. Reciprocity, right? Like we talked about, did we give value first or are we just asking? That's always number one. Urgency, is there a real reason to act now or is this fake urgency? Answer question that to yourself. There's also friction, which is did we remove the biggest barrier of purchase? Another one is obviously we talked about curiosity. Did we intrigue him or did we give everything away? Of course, identity is a big one that we talked about, which is Did we reinforce who they are or did we just pitch the product at them? And last is the momentum. Did we get the small actions to build up to the purchase or did we just go straight for the sale?
And the key here is if your messages don't hit at least one of these, it's probably not going to convert very well.
Are usually doing multiple things at once.
