A business’s ultimate goal is to launch email marketing campaigns that bring great results. To achieve that, they should have strategies that drive high email engagement. The process indicates how your email leads interact with your campaigns.
When trying to achieve a high engagement level, companies need to monitor several metrics and make informed decisions to craft successful campaigns. In the article, we are going to define what email engagement is and what steps businesses should take to improve it and meet their business goals.
What is email engagement, and what metrics should you measure
There are different metrics that companies need to measure for building high-performing email marketing strategies. Let’s look at and define some of them:
✔Open rate
This is one of the most critical aspects of effective campaigns. Businesses calculate the percentage of leads who click and open the emails that they have received.
✓ Click-through rate (CTR)
It’s common practice for businesses to include different links in their message, and CTR measures the percentage of email recipients who clicked those links.
✔Conversion rate
Typically, emails are designed around a certain goal and convince email leads to take some steps. eCommerce businesses that send product launch emails try to convert leads into a customer who makes a purchase. In other cases, the goal of the message could be to encourage email recipients to click and download educational materials.
✔Unsubscribe rate
The metric indicates the percentage of recipients who don’t want to receive emails from your company anymore. Basically, the company’s message is irrelevant to their interests, and they aren’t engaged with the email.
✔ Spam rate
It indicates a number of email recipients have reported emails as spam. To avoid spam complaints, companies take the necessary step to increase deliverability.
Five tactics to increase your email engagement
After realizing the importance of email engagement and metrics, the next step is to find the right strategies that will help you generate great results. Here we will discuss some steps that can drastically improve engagement levels.
Write subject lines that get opened
We already discussed the importance of a high open rate for your email marketing campaign’s efficiency. And subject lines play a huge role in that process. And the reason is that they are the first thing email recipients see in their inboxes and decide whether to open or ignore messages.
There are several characteristics that a compelling subject line should have. First, it needs to be short and concise. In addition to that, the subject lines should emphasize the benefits that your emails suggest and highlight the purpose of your messaging. It should tell email leads what information they should expect in the email.
Moreover, don’t ignore the importance of a preheader that can support your subject and give extra information about your message. A well-written preheader will encourage email recipients to open your email.
In the next step, try to personalize your subject lines, as research suggests that there is a 50% increase in open rates of emails with personalized subject lines. Subject line personalization not only includes adding email leads names but also emphasizing that your offer is particularly designed for email recipients.
In addition to making your message relevant for email leads, it also creates excitement around your campaign and makes customers feel if they don’t open your message, they will miss great opportunities. Make sure that in your message, people will get what your subject line promised.
Finally, don’t hesitate to test different subject lines of your customer engagement email to have information on what versions perform better and deliver a higher open rate.
Personalize your message
As personalization remains the key factor for building successful marketing campaigns, it is also vital for achieving a high email engagement level. Personalization drives engagement and can increase sales. In fact, the survey approved that personalized email campaigns drive six times more transactions than not personalized emails.
To make your content extremely relevant to customers’ interests and needs, you should implement several tactics.
Fortunately, now there are endless opportunities to collect data about customers. Businesses should discover information about their customer’s location and age. Also, gathering behavioral data and discovering purchasing history is an important step for creating customized content. Having psychographic data about customers’ motivations, desires, and values will be quite helpful in this stage.
As personalization remains the key factor for building successful marketing campaigns, it is also vital for achieving a high email engagement level. Personalization will drive engagement and can increase revenue. When you try to find ways how to increase newsletter engagement, don’t hesitate to personalize those newsletters.
Fortunately, now there are endless opportunities to collect data about customers. Businesses should discover information about their customer’s location, age, and profession. Furthermore, they need to gather information about what type of products they bought and their location. Having psychographic data about customers’ motivations, desires, and values will be quite helpful in this stage.
Having all this valuable information in your hand, in the next step, companies should build customer personas that will guide them to smartly use collected data. By having customer personas in mind, businesses can suggest relevant content that addresses customer needs and interests.
In addition to this, they can use purchase history to offer relevant recommendations and, as a result, will boost sales. Lastly, in this case, it will be beneficial to collect data about customers’ birthdays and celebrate their special days.
Segment your email list
Email segmentation is the core of effective email marketing campaigns that drive high email engagement. Without segmenting your leads, it’s impossible to deliver a personalized approach. And the reason is that your customers most probably have different desires and struggles, so you should segment them into groups and target them more effectively. Customers love to feel valued and receive the message that is designed for them, not for the entire subscriber list.
The categories you can use to segment recipients include:
✓ Demographic and geographic segmentation
This gives an idea of where your target customer lives, gender, industry education, and income levels.
✓ Behavioral segmentation
This includes their purchase history and online behavior.
✓ Stage in the customer sale cycle
For loyal customer who frequently buys, you can offer loyalty rewards, but for an email lead who has shown interest but didn’t purchase yet, you need a totally different tactic.
✓ Psychographic segmentation
Knowing the values and motivations of your customers and what inspires them is the most important factor that makes your campaigns successful. You can also define customer lifecycle stages and customize offers based on segmentation.
Make outstanding email content
Without a doubt, the content remains a significant factor in creating great customer engagement email. Therefore email content also should hook the email lead’s attention and convince them to take certain actions.
First, consider including visuals, which are extremely important for making your message engaging. Thus, sharing high-quality videos and striking images to emphasize your messaging. Don’t ignore GIFs and quizzes that can make your email more interactive. This is true when you are looking for ways how to increase newsletter engagement because eye-catching visuals can help you reach that goal.
In the next step, it will be beneficial to showcase the values that your offer will deliver to customers and how your product or services will make customers’ lives better. This makes it crucial to share social proof, like case studies and testimonials, to support your messaging with real examples. By including social proof and making engaging email content, businesses can increase the conversion rate of their email marketing campaigns.
Put effort into creating compelling CTA
As we mentioned, the importance of conversion rate is to make your email marketing campaign successful. And only by having a strong CTA can you encourage email leads to take action and, as a result, improve your click-through rate and drive more conversions.
There are several tactics that you should follow to make effective CTA
✔ Use specific and actionable verbs
This way, you can make a strong CTA and achieve various goals. In case your online store promotes its products, you should use strong verbs that will convince the email recipients to make a purchase.
✔ Make the CTA button visible
It is vital that email recipients can easily see your CTA, therefore using contrasting colors will be a smart idea
✔ Create a sense of urgency
This point is especially true for limited-time email campaigns, but vital for all types of emails to mention that if not participated, they will lose the great opportunity.
✔ Be Clear
The most important factor in improving the conversion rate is making CTA concise. You should clearly communicate what you are expecting from email recipients: download an ebook or purchase your products.
✔ Optimize for mobile users
A huge percentage of email recipients check their inboxes via their smartphones. This fact makes it essential to have an effective mobile CTA to boost engagement.
Lastly, don’t forget to test your CTAs to increase their efficiency and drive great results.
To sum up
When putting effort into building email strategies, businesses should pay attention to email engagement. It is one of the most significant KPIs that is the core of a successful email marketing strategy.
In the article, we offered five steps, following which companies can drastically enhance engagement levels. And doing so can accomplish other important business goals as well.
