Your belly button is an email marketing tool.

November 9, 2022

Picture of a woman's stomach, with her hands surrounding her belly button, which could be an excellent email marketing tool.

Wait… IS your belly button an email marketing tool?  Damn right it is.  Here’s why.

Consumers kinda suck, don’t they?  They need to be rewarded for everything we want them to do…liking things, sharing things, buying things, answering things.  It’s maddening.

Well marketers, we have no one to blame but ourselves.  We’ve conditioned people to chase carrots and respond to hoopla…which means we’ve ALSO conditioned them to ignore stuff that’s boring, predictable, trite, and unrewarding.  If you add in clutter from other sources, their willingness to focus on your boring stuff drops even lower.

Where does this leave email subject lines?  At the top of your “spend brainpower here” list.

Think about it…all the time and energy you spend creating the perfect email content is 100% useless if people don’t open the email.  And when sifting through their barrage of daily incoming emails, consumers use three main criteria to determine which ones will get their attention:

  1. How much they care about you vs. how much they care about the rest of the senders sitting in their inbox.
  2. How much time they have available when your email arrives.
  3. Is the content going to be worth their time?

And #3 is why subject lines should get your brainpower.  You have little or no control over #1 and #2.  

If your email marketing subject lines are things like “August Newsletter” or “News from…” or even something a little more specific like “Winter Packages at…”… you are relying on the first two criteria (which – again – are beyond your control) to supply the magic “open sesame” of consumer response.

But if your subject line is something like…

Procrastination is fine. (From Pacifica Hotels)

I hate purple. (From Chilewich)

Stick Season – Have You Ever Experienced It? (From West Hill House B&B)

The ecosystem of your belly button. (From American Museum of Natural History)

Hydrangea Heaven at Chatham Bars Inn. (From Chatham Bars Inn)

Because our first shoe had to be perfect. (From Everlane)

Caution:  Do not lick this email.  (From Seamless)

…you’re using the subject line as a lure to snap desensitized recipients to attention.  It’s likely that 80% or more of the emails they receive each day have boring subject lines.  Make yours interesting and you’re one notch closer to seducing them into seeing your email content.

Here’s the best part.  If you pay heed to #3 (teasing interesting content)…and then you actually ensure that the content IS interesting…over time, it’s going to positively impact #1 and #2.  Remember: marketers train consumers.  And the more you train them that your emails are interesting, the more that #1- they will care about you and your messages, and #2- no matter when your email arrives, they will make the time to read it.

It’s a delicious cycle of persuasive marketing goodness.  And soon you will find that consumers – those picky, aloof, what’s-in-it-for-me monsters we marketers have created – will suck just a little bit less.

Tourism folks may not easily be able to use a belly button as an email marketing tool – although for years, we worked for Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Times Square and no body parts were off limits for marketing there – but the concept is the same.  At the end of the day, it’s all about making your marketing more persuasive.  And therefore, making all that precious time you spend creating content…worth it.