Offering incentives in the subject line

Moves in email marketing series

This post is a part in a series I’m calling “Moves in email marketing”. Click on that link to see the other posts in the series. The posts are based on my academic research on the topic.

The word “move” is used to describe something that the language of does, whether it offers an incentive, pressures customers into acting, or entices them to respond. This term is borrowed from academic literature on genre (most notably Bhatia’s Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings).

The language of email marketing is designed to make people act. But it does this in various ways. Today we’re going to look at the rhetorical move of “Offering incentives” in subject lines in email marketing. The term “Offering incentives” is straightforward: when the language in a marketing text indicates a sale or a bonus or some free item, then it is offering an incentive.

In my research, I found that this is the second most common tactic occurring in email marketing subject lines (the first is “Introducing the offer,” more on that in a later post). And the most common way that marketers use this rhetorical move is by indicating a discount on price. Here are a few examples with the incentives in bold:

As you can see, numbers play a key role in offering incentives. This is especially the case when an actual price is given (rather than just a percentage discount) because when a company tells customers the price, the implication is that the price is low – or at least lower than usual. It’s easy to see this in the “$1.99” example above, but people will assume that an explicit price is an incentive. Think about the alternative: why would a company advertise that their prices are high?

There are also some more subtle ways that incentives are offered to customers. Take a look at these subject lines:

The incentives are more subtle in these subject lines. There’s a free appetizer (not specified which one), a coupon (its value is unsure), and some general savings on a haricut. But the incentives are still there and they help entice readers to open the email, especially if they are already in the market for what’s on offer. Even a suggestion at incentivizing the deal is enough to get the job done. And at the end of the day, the subject line’s main purpose is to get readers to open the email.

There are other rhetorical moves (and a lot more) happening simultaneously in email marketing subject lines. I’ll discuss them in a future post. Leave a comment below with some interesting incentives that you have seen.