The Hook Model and How It Applies to Your Onboarding Email Sequences

Wouldn’t it be great if your customers made a habit of reading your emails? If they regularly open and engage with your emails, think about what that will do for your click-through rates and your bottom line.

The truth is that we all tend to build habits without realizing it. Checking emails is one thing that we do with little or no conscious thought. Some people check their emails in the morning before the start of workday, others check their emails before they go to bed at night.

This habit forming behaviour creates an opportunity to get in touch with your new users and help them get hooked on reading your emails. This brings us to the hook model. In this article, you’ll learn about the hook model and how it applies to your onboarding email sequences.

Table of content

1. What is the hook model?
2. Why is the hook model important?
3. How to apply the hook model
4. Applying the principles of the hook model
   

What is the hook model?

The hook model is about building a customer habit. It is a four-phase process that businesses implement to get customers in the habit of using their products or services.

According to Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products, he defines a habit as the thing we do with little or no conscious thought. Eyal provides a helpful four-phase process for getting customers forming a habit around your product.

First phase is a trigger through your emails. Second is an action to satisfy the trigger, third phase is variable reward and then investment. Going through each of these phases in the hook model makes the customer build a habit around using your product,  hence the name “hooked.” It also aims to identify pressing customer problems and connect your business solution, through engagement driving techniques and processes.

Why is the hook model important?

In order to get users accustomed to reading your emails (which will lead to more use of your product), you must identify user behaviours' that will give you an idea of how to create emails that customers would get hooked on. If you don’t strategically get your customers engaged with your emails, it’ll be hard to keep them coming back for more.

If you develop a habit, you repeat it almost with no thought. A habit is an automatic behaviour triggered by situational cues. A major advantage the hook model provides is that it helps guide customers through a series of experiences known as hooks. The more customers experience these habit forming experiences, the more they will get attached to your product and services.

How to apply the hook model

So the big question is, “how do you get people hooked?” In this section, you’ll learn about the four phases that customers must experience before they form the habit of using your product or service. Like we mentioned earlier, there are four phases namely:

• Trigger
• Action
• Variable reward
• Investment

1. Trigger

If you’ve noticed, there’s usually a trigger before an action is performed. Your phone beeps notifying you of a message, that's a trigger right there. Your next line of action will be to pick up your phone and read a message. Triggers can be external just like the notification example mentioned earlier. It can also be internal like feeling bored or wanting to binge watch a long series of your favourite tv show. Even emails can be a source of internal and external triggers. For example, a sender’s email subject line or CTA. A key driver for your customer reading your email could be curiosity, excitement which are internal triggers.

Typeform shows a great example of using trigger emails to drive user action.  After signing up to use the app, typeform sends a drip campaign of 5 email series to educate users on how to use the app. These daily emails can help new users regularly use the app, hence building a habit in the process.

You can also use trigger emails for users that haven’t used your product in a while. Just like Groove did in a “win them back” email.

Now, the ball is in your court. What are your customers' internal triggers? You need to identify what drives your customers to read your emails. Then use them to write effective subject lines and CTAs that will drive your customers’ internal triggers as well.

2. Action

An action is what follows after a trigger. When it comes to your email marketing campaigns, you want your customers to perform specific actions such as clicking your CTA button or reading your email copy. You may even want them to share your email with friends and family. To get users to carry out a specific behaviour you need to motivate them enough to carry out the intended action. Even more, the action has to be as easy as possible.

If you want your customers to get in the habit of engaging with your emails, you need to reward them after performing this action. This leads us to the next phase.

3. Reward

According to Eyal, there are three types of rewards in the hook model:

• Reward of the tribe such as social rewards
• Reward of the hunt such as search for material resources
• Reward of the self such as personal gratification or feelings of competency, mastery.  

To give your customers reward of the tribe, you need to make them feel like they are part of an important club. Once they have this belief, they’ll also be eager to engage with your emails because they’ll feel like they are part of something special.

Another way you can give your customers rewards of the tribe is by connecting them with other members of your company. Just like Steli, co-founder and CEO of Close did in the email below.

Is there an employee that can share valuable and interesting content for your customers? This is a great way to make customers feel valued and part of a valuable community.

Rewards of the hunt are material resources such as goods, products, services or information to help customers solve their problems and challenges. For example, you can give your customers valuable resources such as free e-books, checklists, webinar recordings or other free resources they will find valuable. These resources are meant to help solve your customers problems and challenges so you need to ensure you share resources that are useful.

Alternatively, you can do a giveaway or discount to your customers. It could be a prize to be given to the first 20 customers that open your emails. Southwest shows a great example of rewards in its email.

This type of reward can leave customers eager and excited to participate with your email campaigns.

Reward of the self has to do with a feeling of self-accomplishment. For instance, consider how you’ll feel after responding to a series of work emails or finishing an e-course. That feeling of self-gratification is usually what drives a person to be more effective at creating habits. You can reward your customers with a sense of accomplishment by creating a value packed email series course for them. At the end of the email series, notify your readers that they’ve completed the course.

4. Investment

This final phase of the hook model is investment. In this phase, your customers put more effort into engaging with your emails. There are two goals to be achieved in this phase. First, you need to ensure that your customers are triggered enough to perform the next action in the next hook phase. Second, as your customer is left with a feeling of accomplishment from the reward phase, you need to get them to commit time, effort and money into consuming your emails. For example, you can get them to subscribe and pay a fee for your exclusive newsletter. Then they need to put in the time, effort to engage with your emails. The idea is that the more your customers spend time on your emails, the more they'll value it, hence forming a habit around your product or service. Alternatively, you can ask your customers to complete an email survey. This is another example of investment. Just like Squarespace did in its email. By asking customers to participate in regular surveys, they invest more in your brand.

In other words, the repeated action performed by your customers improves how they interact with your product or service.

Applying the principles of the hook model

As you have learned, the hook model is ideal for getting your new users hooked on reading your emails. Using triggered onboarding and follow-up email series, you can motivate and guide your users to become more invested and engaged in your product.

Remember that you need to understand your users’ behaviour, internal triggers and motivations. This way you can deliver more targeted and relevant content to them. As a result, your emails will provide more value to your customers, making them hooked on your emails.  

Engage provides powerful customer segmentation to understand your customers' behaviour and actions. Engage also provides automation to power your email sequences through easy triggers and workflows.