How To Use Activators In Your Marketing - Adult B2B Marketing Tip of the Day

ACTIVATORS TO CREATE POWERFUL MARKETING THAT CANNOT BE GUARDED AGAINST


I received an email this week that I thought was quite remarkable for one very distinct reason – the subject line was so powerful that I had to open it. Absolutely could not help it. I HAD to. I bet you would like to know what the subject line was.

Well here it is: "Hey, you never responded to my email. Why??!!”

Now I ask you – each of you – would you have felt compelled to open this email? Be honest now and tell me if this sounds familiar. You get a lot of email and there happens to be one or two you really did not want to answer right now. A week goes by and you keep looking at the date the email was sent and say to yourself, “Well this is not THAT important; I’ll just delete it and forget that I ever got it. If they call or try again, I’ll just blame the computer.”

Then a few days after you delete the thing, the person writes back and says, “Hey, I emailed you and you never responded, what’s up?”

Sound familiar? (And that just happens to be the point.) This is why I HAD to open it. Because the subject line – and I am going to call it the headline from here on out – touched an ACTIVATOR. These Activators are powerful things and I think that you are not aware of just how powerful activators really are.

I opened the email and guess what? It was a sales pitch; they were trying to sell generic Viagra – you know something really tacky. In fact, the email itself sucked. But in terms of just getting me to open the email and just pay attention, they wrote a headline that ROCKED; I was sucked in with eight words – EIGHT WORDS.

An activator is something that is familiar, problematic or unusual. The best way to illustrate the power of activators is the cocktail party situation. Picture yourself at a cocktail party talking to a group of friends. While you are listening to a story about some nonsense or such, you hear your name being called out. What do you do? You automatically turn your head – the key here is AUTOMATICALLY – you could barely stop yourself even if you knew beforehand. Your name, being familiar to you, draws you, compels you to respond. Your Reticular Activating System searches around for this stuff and when it finds it, it turns your brain on – AUTOMATICALLY.

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