RightSpot Media | Digital Performance Marketing

How a funny email can increase sales 15%

Posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 2:01 PM by Simon Smith  |  Comments (0)

Some purist copywriters might take issue. But according to a recent study, humor can increase sales and shift negotiations in your favor.

Ever since Claude Hopkins dictated that "people don’t buy from clowns," humor has been controversial in advertising—and particularly suspect in direct response copywriting.

The latest issue of Inside Influence Report, however, suggests that while people might not buy from clowns, they will buy more from someone who uses humor to generate trust and rapport.

Humor improves returns

The study was conducted by Dr. Terri Kurtzberg from Rutgers University, Charles E. Naquin from DePaul University and Liuba Belkin from Lehigh University.

The researchers wanted to know how humor in the early stages of negotiation might affect the outcome.

So they had participants negotiate a complex contract by email.

Half the group started negotiations by sending a funny, inoffensive Dilbert cartoon to their negotiating partner. The other half didn’t. 

Result? The group that started with a cartoon generated higher levels of trust, resulting in a 15% bigger return and increased satisfaction levels on both sides.

The cartoon also made negotiating partners less extreme when making their first offer, and made negotiations more efficient.

The researchers explain the results by saying that "having some sense of ‘the other side’ as a real person and not just an e-mail address seems to help negotiators build trust and rapport, and thus create better agreements with each other."

Test your comedy

So what are copywriters and content marketers to make of the study?

In my opinion, one important fact is that the researchers tested the cartoon before using it.

By showing it to other businesspeople before using it in the study, they knew it was considered funny and inoffensive by their target demographic.

This is important because not everyone has the same sense of humor.

So it’s probably safe to use humor in marketing content. But always be sure that your target market will actually find your communication funny.

And, as Claude Hopkins would no doubt say, always test to see whether humor really outperforms something more straightforward.

Tags: copywriting, email marketing, humor