Did you know that email has a certain addictive quality?

If you're a normal person, I'm sure you've checked your email in the last 60 minutes. If you haven't, you're not from this planet...

Even if we don't realise it, we check our email a lot more than we think we do. In fact, according to the experiment "A Day Without Distraction: Lessons Learned from 12 Hours of Forced Focus". of 99U, technology distracts us for only 11 minutes after we start working, and it takes us 25 minutes to get back to our tasks fully. And it takes us 25 minutes to get back to our tasks completely. The main culprit? Email. Email is the main cause of distraction in our workplaces.. Although we sometimes feel that we are working with it, it certainly takes us away from much more important tasks. Therefore, email exerts a power over us that most people are unaware of.
Many people say they "hate" email, but it is certainly addictive. If you think about how many times you check email a day, you'll realise that what I say is true. The question is... Why does email have such an addictive condition?

Psychologists call it "Operant Conditioning"What we translate into English as "Operant Conditioning". And you might be wondering... What the hell is that? Well, in the video below you will understand a little more about what we mean by this concept.

Operant conditioning is a form of learning by which a person is more likely to repeat certain forms of behaviour that have positive consequences, and less likely to repeat those that have negative consequences. So what does this concept have to do with email marketing? Well, despite everything that has been said about this channel, email touches our brain and our subconscious and works as a positive stimulus on people.. Just as we learn that if we put our hand in the fire we will burn ourselves and then we don't do it, the brain also relates that when we enter our email there will be something new waiting for us, which generates excitement and curiosity. It is a way of relating behaviours with consequences, in the latter case, positive ones. So we will repeat that action as a habitual way and unconsciously, we will create a dependence on that habit.

According to a survey conducted by AOL, 47% of people admit to being hooked on email. Curious, isn't it?
Although email is associated with certain positive values, it can also provoke negative feelings such as stress, disappointment or anger. Either because our inbox is saturated with commercial emails, because we have a lot of work emails or because what awaits us in our inbox does not meet our expectations of excitement and curiosity that we had beforehand. In fact, several studies have shown that those who look at their email less often live much more relaxed lives than those who do so on a regular basis.

What conclusions should marketers draw from this post? That we should bombard our users' emails? NO! The conclusion we should draw is that we have before us a potential channel to reach our users. Users "love" email more than they admit they do. We must know how to understand them and offer them what they really want, always respecting them, pampering them and making sure that the excitement and curiosity they feel when they open the email does not disappear, but on the contrary, increases and they want to know more about us.