How To Apply AIDA With Email Marketing

The AIDA model describes the four stages someone could go through when making a buying decision. It is a simple model and the reality is that your audience will go through a more complex process in reality, but nonetheless is has some value and in this article I will explain how it can be applied to email marketing. Key Takeaways

• 4 Stages of AIDA are attention, interest, desire and action

• It is a simple model

• You can apply this to make your email marketing work harder
  

Using AIDA with your email marketing

Think of AIDA is an inverted pyramid. Or a funnel if you like.

Think about how you want your emails to be read, and how you want to draw interest down your email, to try and create an action through your CTA button.

Let's start with grabbing attention. You need to show the goal of your email and grab the attention of your audience. Grabbing attention means providing a subject line that is RELEVANT to your audience. One that is contextual as wel as interesting to get the email opened. It also means designing the layout of the email to grab attention at the top and funnel them down your email.

Getting Interest

You've done the hard part of grabbing attention and encouraged your audience to open your email and want to read more. Next is maintaining that interest.

Time is a challenge because everyone is busy. So you don't have much time to do this. First of all, you must make sure your email is relevant to your audience. Segmentation and personalistion really help with this, but that is a different topic.

To help, think about why you are sending them that email and why should they care? This is achieved through building relevance. Ask yourself this: why are you sending them this email? What value are they going to get from it?

Finally, to generate interest, keep your email content short. Use short sentences, short words and short paragraphs.

Creating Desire

After you've created interest by being relevant, you use your copy and design to move to building some desire. Highlight the value of your product, for example, and how it might solve problems. Answer "what's in it for me?".

However, don't expect this to be achieved in just ONE email. It takes time to build trust which is why the concept of lead nurturing is crucial.

Generating Action

Finally by this point you want to have your audience do something, probably click on your CTA button.

Use verbs and clear language so the reader knows exactly what to do. make it easy to see your CTA button. Use your colours wisely and contrast your CTA button to the main brand colour(s).

What Are The Downsides? The beauty of AIDA is its simplicity. The downside is also its simplicity. Marketing today is far more complex and we know that everyone in your target audience is different and will respond to different stimuli (hence the importance of segmentation). Yes there are more sophisticated strategies you can apply and you may even use email marketing simply to generate interest and use other parts of the mix to convert. But it is a simple approach to apply t see some enhanced results.

Give it a go.