3 Risky Email Marketing Techniques That Could Actually Increase Engagement

When it comes to taking risks with your marketing, it’s all about finding a happy medium. While there are certainly plenty of tried-and-true techniques for optimizing your email and social media marketing, sometimes shaking things up a bit can pay off.

Unless you’re already successful beyond your wildest dreams, there’s always something more you could do to innovate and increase reader engagement. What’s more boring and repetitive than a company that always, without fail, sends you the same content with the same sales pitch week in and week out?

If you spend most of your time testing, optimizing and perfecting your strategy, and you’ve established your brand and your voice, you can afford to throw the occasional curveball if it has the potential to score you a boost in audience engagement.

The trick to trying something unconventional is to think about the best and worst case scenarios and weigh the potential benefit against the risk. Use these three examples (complete with risk/benefit analysis) as a jumping-off point for your own experiments with unconventional email marketing.

1. Use a Wacky Subject Line

As we’ve discussed in the past, standing out in the inbox is both a science and an art. As technology changes, so should your strategy when writing subject lines, since what works one year might not perform as well the next year (the prevalence of mobile email reading is a perfect example of this). Some research says subject line length is important, while some insists it doesn’t matter. Some say you should avoid spam trigger words, but others say you can use them cautiously if you already have a good email reputation. Since there’s no clear consensus, testing something out of the norm might surprise you with a great open rate.

Ways to spice up your subject line:

Reference a movie title or a song lyric.

“8 Words That Will Get Your Email Opened” (Get it?)

<Recipient’s Name>, why haven’t I heard from you?

“Hey.” (If it can work for the President…)

Use words like “free,” “offer” and “sale,” which are all traditionally spam triggers but may boost your open rate if you use them sparingly (especially if it’s worth your readers’ time).

POTENTIAL RISK: A slight ding to your email reputation if you come off as too spammy or depart too much from your brand identity.

POTENTIAL REWARD: A lot more people open your email, see your content and engage with your business.

2. Go Crazy with Your Send Time

If you think subject line best practices are up for debate, just wait ‘till you see the research on email send times. Some say early mornings and weekends. Some say 8 p.m. to midnight. Some say morning and early afternoon. Wordstream and Mailchimp swear by specific days at specific times. As you can see, there’s really no consensus about the best day and time to send an email campaign, so the real risk here is to not experiment.

So don’t be afraid to send an email at, say, midnight. Or at 10 p.m. on a Friday night. Or at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday. The important thing is to try new days and times until you’re able to develop a general rule of thumb about when your particular audience tends to actively read emails.

POTENTIAL RISK: Fewer people see your email, but you learn something about your audience’s habits.

POTENTIAL REWARD: More people see and engage with your email, and you learn even more about your audience’s habits.

3. Be a Little Negative

Negativity is a highly underrated marketing strategy. Marketers shy away from negativity because they don’t want to run the risk of pulling a Debbie Downer on their customer base. But sometimes negative equals provocative. By putting a slightly negative angle on your content, you can:

• reference pain points.
• address your customers’ fears.
• offer a solution to a problem.

For example, we recently created an infographic for real estate agents about how to fail at real estate. At first glance it paints a doom-and-gloom picture of their business, but it’s actually a tool on how to more effectively spend their marketing dollars, not a plot to send them into a spiral of depression. As long as you end your problem-focused content with a silver lining about how to solve it, going negative is barely a risk at all. Just don’t overdo it.

POTENTIAL RISK: A very low risk of turning off a few readers.

POTENTIAL REWARD: Your audience sees that you understand their problems and how to solve them, leading to a boost in business.

Parting Advice

Let me emphasize that you should use these unconventional tactics sparingly. Even the best, most attention-grabbing gimmick will perform poorly if you wear out its welcome. Start with a solid understanding of how to develop effective email campaigns, and once you have those down you can start to pepper in these riskier techniques.

For some pro tips to help you perfect your own email strategy, check out this guide featuring nine proven ways to get your emails opened and clicked: 9 Point Checklist for Higher Email Open Rates in 2015.