Why You Need Reveal Marketing

Maybe you’ve heard the buzzword reveal marketing.

Although it’s been around for a few years, a lot of brands still aren’t fully embracing reveal marketing for its full potential — namely how it can help improve your email stats.

In fact, our very own research has shown that reveal marketing can drive engagement by over 4x.

Did that stat get your attention?

Good.

Because in this post, we’re going to cover some of the basics around reveal marketing and why you need to be using it in your email campaigns.

What’s reveal marketing?

Basically, it’s an interactive marketing strategy that relies on users to actively uncover hidden information.

Think a scratch ticket but in virtual form.

In email form, it looks something like this:

Looks intriguing, right?

This email has a special offer related to your birthday. This is a perfect email campaign to send to reengage readers or just get people clicking — after all who doesn’t like a little something special on a big day?

But unlike many other coupon or discount style emails that you’ll often see, you aren’t given your “top secret” prize upfront.

Instead, you have to scratch away the cover to reveal what’s going on underneath.

If your curiosity is getting the better of you, and you’d really like to know what the offer is, then this campaign is doing its job.

For most people, it’s very hard to close out something like this without knowing what’s underneath.

That’s part of the magic of reveal marketing.

So, you scratch it and get your prize:

Ta-da!

Hey, 25% isn’t too shabby, happy birthday to you.

Why reveal marketing works so well

The big reason why reveal marketing gets results is that it is deeply attuned with human behavior and psychology.

As complex as we like to think we are, the reality is we’re often triggered by simple stuff: curiosity, fear of missing out, and conditioning are all vital aspects of psychology and emotion as well as marketing.

The scratch it you see is a perfect example.

When something like this drops into your email, it’s hard to resist. That part is simple.

But what’s really going on is your brain is being ticked. That curiosity, what’s behind that special gift offer is like a scratch that you just need to itch. You have to find out what’s hidden.

And if you don’t?

Well, that’s the fear of missing out, otherwise known as FOMO. Your brain looks at that image and subconsciously starts getting nervous that something amazingly cool is behind that and if you don’t interact with it, you’re going to miss out on something that will make you happy.

So, you scratch that itch and move from a passive person to someone who is actively engaging with the interactive content right in front of you.

That active engagement matters too.

It helps build not only a mental and emotional connection to what you’re clicking on but it’s also starting to condition you to expect to perform this action again at some point down the road. You’re more likely to click on this type of email when you see it again.

Starting to see why reveal marketing gets results?

Where can you use reveal marketing?

The short answer is pretty much anywhere.

It’s great for your emails, as you’ve seen. But you can also use it on your site in the form of pop-ups to convert people to your email list.

Here’s one example:

You can see how the concept works the same way as with inside an email, but it’s just placed on your site instead.

Beyond these examples, there’s a lot more you can do with reveal marketing including quizzes, polls, and calculators, to name a few.

And you can use reveal marketing in your Facebook and SMS campaigns as well.

This type of marketing can be used anywhere that you want to get people to move from passive to active engagement. Even creating a microsite or an online whitepaper that gets people clicking and engaging with it is a form of reveal marketing that can help your brand.

Give reveal marketing a try

We’ve only covered the surface of how reveal marketing can make a real impact on your marketing efforts.

So, imagine what it can do for your company if you really dig into it? Integrating reveal marketing into your campaigns can help build customer loyalty and improve your engagement rates.

And that’s pretty good for your bottom line.