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From a general perspective, funny emails go against making informative and clear content, so you might wonder why even use those. Here are some research-backed reasons why you should at least consider making jokes in emails from your business:
Jokes aren’t only for April Fools’ email ideas, they can be effective year-round. Wondering what emails would benefit from a humorous tone? Keep reading, and we’ll show you some hilarious examples.
The most obvious place to use humor is, of course, a subject line. Funny subject lines can make your marketing campaign more noticeable and make someone’s day better. Beyond those, however, almost any email type can be funny if your wits are sharp enough. Here are some email examples with a humorous tone.
Marketing professionals and business executives receive tons and tons of cold emails every day. Most of them are cookie-cutter and straightforward, so different messages tend to blend. Humor can make an audience notice you and engage. One of the most successful people to prove that is Jon Buchan who made an entire strategy around using a funny tone of voice.
the Founder and Director of Charm Offensive
Cold emails benefit from humour because prospects are more likely to reply, and reply positively, if you make them smile or laugh out loud. You’ll make the best first impression possible. You’ll get remembered. Your email may get shared around the office. Prospects will reply without the usual corporate tone, speaking more like a friend. Your conversations with them are more candid and honest. And most importantly, they’ll actually look forward to a call with you, rather than begrudgingly agreeing to one. This puts you at a gigantic advantage over your competition.
Below is one of the direct mailers Jon Buchan sent. The letter details that the author got the person’s details from a list and wants to chat about “digital marketing or advertising, spectacular content creation, or bedroom tidying needs” and warns that he’ll “be in touch when you least suspect it”. It also features a picture of a ferret wearing a bunny ears hat.
If you were to search for funny cold emails, you probably wouldn’t find many examples, so years after Jon Buchan sent his famous message, this strategy is still a good one to try. Here is a recent example from Gusto:
If your company has a particular tone of voice, it’s best to introduce your audience to it straight away. A humorous welcome email can set the customers’ expectations from the get-go and maybe even create an emotional connection.
In this email marketing campaign, Surreal congratulates newly subscribed people on entering the club — a secret society but with “less world domination”. The jokes don’t go too far, which is important. The email has a typical newcomers’ discount, describes the product’s benefits, and also offers social proof:
Cart abandonment emails may not tend to be funny, but these too can benefit from a touch of humor. A funny email subject line, a pun, or a nice illustration all can make a difference in how your customers view the campaign. It might be exactly what pushes your message from annoying to persuasive.
In this example, a shoe brand uses subtle humor to convince the audience that the product is made for them:
As we’ve pointed out earlier, funny advertisements are more memorable, and it is the same for funny emails. There are a lot of ideas you can try:
Here is a clever example that takes a real unique selling proposition of a product and uses absurd data to emphasize it:
Don’t limit humor to only promotional emails as funny newsletters can entertain your audience too, and also excite them about each subsequent issue, and make them more likely to convert. A friendly and playful tone of voice is an important differentiating factor that can set you apart from the competition.
We especially like themed newsletters like this one from Thortful. The brand sent this email on May 4th, so it is full of Star Wars references and jokes:
Winning back customers takes a lot of effort. You need to remind them why your company deserves a second chance and reignite the emotional connection they once had with your business. Charm can be just the right approach that pushes people to conversion.
A funny tone works best with a good offer. So you first use your sense of humor to get through to your subscribers and pique their interest and then add a discount or good product recommendations.
This re-engagement email is truly hilarious albeit bending the email etiquette rules. It claims to have some non-existent data on a subscriber’s friend and plays on a universal human desire to compete and win:
Now, prepare for even more inspiration — we hand-picked funny email marketing campaigns you can use as a template for your own creations. Ready to be humored?
This email perfectly captures the playful, approachable tone of voice of Recess communication. It is written completely in lowercase (except for the brand name) which makes it look modern and friendly. Plus, this campaign’s design and content are stripped down of almost anything besides copy reminding us of plain text emails.
As to what makes it funny, it’s the absurdist ideas for how to use the product which are described quite seriously. Using a can of drink as a forehead cooler might be one of the things people do but reading about it in a promotional email is ridiculous.
Want to copy the strategy? Find creative ideas for how to use the items you sell and maybe illustrate those with some photographs!
Humor is very personal, and it makes sense for a message from a company CEO to be funny. We wouldn’t have expected less from a brand that has a pun in its name!
This email works thanks to being specific and at the same time relatable. A weird-sounding experience of sorting through candies is described in detail, plus, there is a reference to Hocus Pocus — a Halloween classic.
Want your Halloween email or a regular campaign to be just as charming? Ask one of the people on your team to write a message just like they would’ve addressed a friend and be genuine about it.
One of the easiest ways to make a funny email is by using UGC. Aeropress — a company known for an eponymous portable coffee brewer — promoted a new addition of the most travel-friendly product of their line with some subscriber stories about their worst travel coffee experience.
The whole topic and stories themselves are funny and at the same time highlight a very real pain point that the brand’s customers have and the product solves. So in your next attempt at marketing humor, try poking fun at alternatives to your product that don’t really work (but be careful with the claims about the competitors!).
Oddly enough, this funny email is by a cookware brand that created a pool float shaped like one of their skillets. The product itself is an example of marketing genius — it is weird, memeable, and at the same time not useless and pretty well designed.
The copy is humorous with a call-back to an old it’s-a-bird meme — “It’s a skillet. It’s a pool float” and calls the reader a “delicious piece of meat” sizzling on the floating skillet under the sun. The subject line “We made a pool float” and the preheader “Fry like an egg!” perfectly complement the message.
This email marketing campaign, however, might be one of the hardest promotional funny emails to recreate since you need to produce an actual product.
Wondering how to create an email marketing funnel? Well, this article isn’t about it, but we are totally sure that holiday marketing emails must be a part of your strategy regardless.
In this Father’s Day email, Quip used a suggestive headline but in a literal sense, to mean the subscriber’s dad, not anyone else. This type of humor wouldn’t work for every brand’s marketing and it may seem too close to being inappropriate but it can resonate with the right kind of people. Plus, these types of jokes work great in subject lines.
Want to follow the lead of some of the brands we showcased here? Use these tips in your next funny marketing email!
Don’t draw out a joke, be brief, and get to the point fast. Plus, if you need to go into a lot of detail for humorous content to resonate, you may need to work on it some more and make it clearer. Take the example of the email marketing campaigns above — some use just a few sentences to be funny.
You know your readers better than anyone else, so you know what to joke about and what is best said in all seriousness. If your audience is young, feel free to reference social media trends, influencers, etc. But if you target, say, Gen Xers, you may stick to something they are better acquainted with or explore nostalgic marketing.
Remember about the larger goal of your campaign. Whether it is to welcome a new subscriber, promote a product, or remind them about a holiday deal, that should come first, and jokes — second. The most important email marketing rule is to create a message that is relevant to the reader and doesn’t waste their time.
Last but not least, your funny emails need to align with your brand’s personality. If you are doing email marketing for a small company, emphasize the leadership or employees’ character and address your audience directly. If there is a vibrant and active community of your brand’s fans, use UGC, and so on.
Humor can add to almost any email marketing campaign. It makes the message more memorable and helps to connect with the audience on a personal level.
Here are some of the email types that can benefit from a joke or two:
