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:
(more…)