Way back in 2020, which is at least 12 years ago in Covid time we wrote about the role of emotion to increase intention to open the envelope.  Intention is a necessary mental way-station to actual opening, it matters.  The more intent, the less likely there’s a gap between intention and doing.

A few key points:

• The envelope plays a much bigger role in creating intent for acquisition (vs. renewal) audiences.
  • Spend less time and money on house file OE
• It’s useful to group emotion into Pleasure and Arousal dimensions.  See the semantic scale for illustration.
• Invoking a sense of Pleasure does more to increase intent to open then than an equal dose of Arousal and this is especially true for house file donors;  and there is a right way and wrong way to do each.

Pleasure is more important than Arousal but you need both, especially for Acquisition.

The other important part is that callouts or imagery on the OE that create sadness or levels of despair aren’t driving intention to open, they are suppressing it.

The creative aim needs to be happy and hopeful.

An OE that creates a happy, hopeful reaction plus creating excitement is really doing the job we hired it to do.

New research reinforces the extra importance of Pleasure over Arousal and shows how color can be used to invoke Pleasure (more important) and Arousal.

Blue and red have the greatest association with Pleasure.  You should use both on your OE as a test.

Next in the hierarchy is green-blue.  Avoid red-green combinations with the obvious exception of Christmas time where tradition and nostalgia trump what was a poor color choice by the Celts who believed Holly was meant to keep the Earth beautiful during the dark, dreary winter days.

For those creatives and color theorists out there know that hue is what really matters, not luminosity or saturation.  And last but certainly not least, the golden ratio matters.

You get a super premium boost in Pleasure if you put a spot of blue at one of the golden ratio points.  In fact, a blue dot in a golden ratio area has 10 times the impact of a blue dot in a random area.

Kevin