Gone are the days of unwanted emails crowding your inbox. Thanks to privacy rules and modern technology, email marketing has come a long way and is doing better than ever. Mass emails bombarding our inboxes is a thing of the past, and now marketers can easily identify and send meaningful emails that their subscribers would be interested in reading.
With current email marketing technology, this means that marketers can see real value in focusing their marketing efforts on retaining their existing customers and keeping them happy. Existing customers are 60% more prone to buy from whereas your new customers have a 20% probability of buying from you. But to retain your customers you need to keep them interested – engaged. To acquire new ones, you need to keep them engaged as well. So email engagement is critical for email marketing.
If you have a decent subscriber list and you are creating amazing content. You have nothing to worry about. Wrong. According to these statistics here, whatever you do you are bound to lose 30% of your email list every year. This means you need to be on your toes and keep your engagement rates high all the time.
What is Email Engagement?
The email engagement metric helps you understand how many of your subscribers are doing more than just clicking on your email. It helps you understand how many of them are truly interacting with your email. To get this metric, you need to take the open rate, the click rate, and the conversion rate. This is one of the most important metrics in understanding the overall success of an email campaign and understanding your subscriber’s behavior. This can help you assess the quality of your email content.
The Golden Rules For Email Engagement
The best tactics to keep your audience engaged have been discussed many times on the internet. That doesn’t take away the fact that they are still the most popular methods to increase email marketing engagement. Let’s talk about them first.
Master The Art Of Storytelling
Create content that inspires your audience, makes them feel something deep inside, for when they do, it helps them take action. A newsletter containing customer stories, company updates, news, tips, and tricks – can be the best way to engage your subscribers. Sharing relevant content with your subscribers can turn them into customers. It helps them connect on a personal level and create life-long relationships.
Don’t try to promote your brand, instead try to tell its story or come up with content that will help them without your subscribers having to buy something.
Harness The Power Of Subject Lines
First impressions are critical. Subject lines are the first thing we notice when an email arrives in our inbox. It is one of the most critical factors that help us decide whether to open the email. The most compelling subject lines often emphasize urgency, fear of missing out, how-to, promises, and humor.
Depending on your industry and target audience and your brand’s voice, you can try different styles. To take your subject lines to another level, add meaningful emojis, coupon codes, or cliffhangers. These help increase the open rate.
Clean Email Design
Email design is an important part of email marketing. A clean design helps the user concentrate on the content and CTA. An email containing images should have a design that highlights them. Currently, 85% of people use smartphones to open emails, and it is essential to have a design that is compatible with phones. Keeping the design and content easy to read on any device can improve the subscriber experience drastically and make them more inclined to read through it.
Use Segmentation
Personalization is something that subscribers love. Instead of sending every email to every subscriber, it ensures that only a subscriber who meets specific requirements receives the email. That way, the content is relevant, and they are more likely to be interested in it. This personalization can happen only when you segment your email list. Creating targeted lists and coming up with a campaign while keeping the segments you have in mind will help you improve the engagement rates.
Your customers are different, and their tastes and interests are different – a one-size-fits-all campaign will not be suitable for your marketing needs. Segmentation will create a more personal experience, give your subscribers what they want and thus increase their likelihood to engage with it.
Automation
By using automation tools, you can ensure that subscribers get emails in a timely manner, and when they are more likely to open and read it. It helps nurture leads and converts your subscribers to customers. Automation tools can send timely and personalized emails to your subscribers, measure conversions, monitor click and open rates do A/B testings and increase overall ROI.
The best part of automation is that you can set it up and forget completely about it, and it will run on its own while you can concentrate on other pending work you might have on your plate. It saves time as well as doesn’t miss any time-sensitive transactional email.
What Else To Do To Elevate Your Email Marketing Engagement?
Make The Most Of Social Proof
What is that one thing that helps us decide when we buy on Amazon, book a hotel for a trip, or even choose a restaurant for a fancy dinner? Online reviews. Products or services that we have not seen or used before are not easy to select. However, about 70% of online purchases are made based on reviews. If you fall in that 70%, you are in good company.
Robert Cialdini, a Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing, wrote a book in 1984, Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion. In this book, he came up with the term social proof. Social proof is the psychological phenomenon where people copy the actions of others who have been in a similar situation before. It happens because we don’t always know what to do in a given situation, and hence following others seems safe. Cialdini explains it in detail in his book.
Think about it, online reviews and even social media influencers are all social proof. When we see many people buy the same product and say good things about it, we feel more confident about purchasing it. And we are more likely to trust a product when someone other than the brand vouches for it.
Email marketing campaigns can be based on the reviews of your product and can be highly engaging. When they see their favorite celebrities or influencers using the same products and have huge regard for them, they will be curious to know about it, buy it and use it themselves. This is a great way to boost engagement.
Don’t Try To Push, Be Helpful
Marketing has evolved a lot over the years. Pushing someone to buy something never works and marketers know it. When you’re trying to improve engagement, it is important not to push your subscribers to buy something. Instead, let your subscribers know how your products and services will improve their lives and solve their problems. Your subscribers probably signed up when you offered some free gift, discount code, exclusive content, or entering a contest. But once that need is fulfilled, how will you keep your users engaged. Be helpful!
For instance, if you have a business that sells gardening equipment, plants and outdoor furniture, you can send your subscribers useful articles on how to set up a kitchen garden, how to redecorate their patio or backyard, what plants are in season – and so on. Try to solve their problems using your products or services instead of selling to them directly. When your subscribers feel they might benefit from buying, they will purchase or be more involved and interested in your brand. Grammarly, for example, provides the user insight into how good their writing has been over the past month. They show how you have been using new or unique words and your grammatical errors. The best part – they compare it with their other users. So, it really boosts your confidence to see how you have been doing compared to others with similar writing skills. Spotify, on the other hand, curates a list of 30 songs that you play the most. This Discovery list was a brilliant idea that attracted 40 million new users!
So ask yourself, what kind of content will help support your subscribers and empower them to do more with your products?
Celebrate Their Milestones
Show your subscribers some love by remembering their special days. Birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and other milestones are days to remember and celebrate. Create special emails that celebrate them and show them appreciation on these days. If possible, add some discount coupons to show some extra love.
However, there is one other way to celebrate their achievements or recognize them. Who doesn’t love to be recognized? Pocket, the app that manages your reading list has a creative way of recognizing its users. Based on what they have read in a year. This recognition is a nice gesture that makes users feel amazing and potentially nostalgic. It increases their trust in your brand and makes them further engaged.
Come Up With Targeted Campaigns Based On Their Interests
Segmentation of email lists will tell you a lot about the kind of audience you have. If you own an apparel company, your clientele can be of any gender or age group. But their tastes would be quite different based on their age, gender, location and other factors. You can easily find out a lot about your audience from link clicks, forms, site tracking, surveys and so on. It becomes easy to segment your users based on their interests. Once you can do that, you must create targeted campaigns with content that appeals to a specific kind of audience.
Netflix does a brilliant job of this. We have all received emails from Netflix suggesting shows based on the ones we have watched already. It is a good example of a targeted campaign to increase engagement with the audience. When you send your subscribers suggestions according to their interests, it doesn’t seem like a sale anymore.
Add GIFS
GIFs can be the only thing missing from your email marketing campaign that can give it a boost like no other. It can go beyond words and mere photographs to express feelings that your audience can relate to. A video works too, but GIFs seem to be more trendy and in the now and are easier to include. It makes the subscriber feel excited about the offer that you are making.
According to this report, Dell increased their revenue by 109% through a GIF-centric campaign. Who knew a little animation could be such a huge game-changer? Adding some movement to your emails can increase open rate, click rate, and finally, revenue. Hence, a must-try.
Creating great content, using personalization, segmenting your list, and being genuine will help you get better results. But you need to constantly re-evaluate how your metrics are doing and where you need to improvise. Come up with a strategy and keep your content dynamic – that will be effective for your campaign.
