The team here at SmartMail might make email marketing look pretty easy, but there’s a big difference between understanding the importance of email marketing engagement and actually knowing how to improve it.
In this article, we’ll introduce you to everything you need to know about how to improve email engagement with 10 simple and implementable tips.
Email Engagement: why bother with it?
Why should a business want to improve and increase email marketing engagement?
1. Increase Revenue
The more engaged your subscribers, customers and readers are the more likely they are to make a purchase or take the desired action.
The more sales are driven through your email marketing campaign the more revenue your company will turn over.
2. Strengthen Brand Loyalty
Customer relationships are everything especially in today’s overcrowded and highly competitive marketplace.
Engaged customers feel more connected and thus loyal to the brand they are following. Email engagement encourages and reinforces that positive relationship.
3. Improve Brand Awareness
An engaged customer is more likely to share and contribute positively to spreading awareness and recognition of your brand.
The greater your brand’s reach, the greater potential there is for growth. Turning your customers into advocates and representatives is an excellent way of achieving just that.
4. Cost Effectiveness
Email marketing is highly cost effective in driving sales, enhancing your brand and generating leads.
For businesses operating with limited budgets, email can be absolutely crucial and offer a very high return on investment.
5. Data for Informed Decisions
Email engagement provides businesses with invaluable data and insights.
With the right metric tracking capabilities you can identify marketing strategies that work, isolate products that are popular and emphasise content and calls-to-action that are successful.
6. Competitive Advantage
Put it this way: A partnership with a company like SmartMail will set you head and shoulders above the competition.
The greater your email engagement rates, the better your marketing results, and the stronger your hold of your market share. Your competitive advantage starts with email marketing engagement.
10 Tips On How To Improve Email Engagement
1. Make it Personal
Emails that are personalized with the customer’s name and segmented based on their interest and past purchase behaviour are more likely to succeed.
People like feeling that the marketing they experience is bespoke and catered to them. Make your email marketing as personal as possible using any of the many email creation software, or with a company like SmartMail.
2. Strong Subject Lines
The subject line of your email needs to be attention grabbing and enticing to encourage email engagement, even in the form of just reading.
Keep your subject line concise, clear and–of course–relevant. If the first thing your customer sees in their email inbox fails to grab their attention or rouse their interest they are not going to engage with your marketing email any further.
3. Make it Mobile Friendly
This is one tip that you might think is obvious but is too often neglected. More and more people are reading their emails on their smartphones, so a marketing email that is not optimized for mobile devices is going to be an instant turn off.
If you want to increase email engagement, it’s essential that you provide customers with an email they can engage with on any device.
4. Make good content
This is another suggestion that might seem obvious but is critical. Make sure your emails offer valuable content that your customers actually want to engage with.
Don’t bore them with technical mumbo jumbo or ram company updates they don’t care about down their throats. Keep your email marketing to exclusive offers, interesting information, upcoming specials and product drops… Anything that they will find genuinely beneficial to know about.
5. Easy Calls-To-Action
The Call To Action is often the most precious form of email engagement as it’s the single action you want them to take. Whether it’s to purchase a new product or subscribe to ongoing newsletters, the more specific and action-oriented the language in your CTA, the more email engagement you’re going to have.
6. A/B Testing
A/B testing is used in a variety of forms of marketing but can be especially helpful in improving email engagement.
Try different versions of your email changing up select elements of each. You can then use the email engagement metrics of each different email to isolate which subject lines, CTAs, offers, content and imagery works best. Over time you’ll develop as powerful and engaging an email template as possible.
7. Be Consistent
Customers like being in the know, and this applies to marketing emails as well. Being consistent with the timing and frequency of your emails will go a long way to encouraging engagement.
Plus, it’s important to keep your branding and content style consistent. Of course, you should be shaking things up to be fresh and new, but the branding should be recognisable to trigger loyal customers to positively engage.
8. Cultivate Your List
Some email engagement metrics are better than others. Number of subscribers may seem important but are not really helpful if the majority of them are inactive. Regularly cultivate and clean your email list to maintain as high a level of engagement as possible.
9. Know Your Metrics
While we’re on the topic of email engagement metrics, it’s vital that you–as a business–know what your goals and objectives are. What are you trying to achieve through this marketing email and how are you measuring it?
Some common email engagement metrics include:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Subscribe rate
- Forward rate
- Social sharing rate
If you need assistance setting up your metric measurements or want to know how best to keep track of your email marketing engagement, don’t hesitate to reach out to the experts here at SmartMail.
10. Make It Engageable
Last but not least: To drive email engagement your email has to be ‘engageable’. Whether this is in the form of interactive content–such as quizzes or surveys–or a personal touch–such as humour and handwritten signatures–is up to you.
Customers want to feel like they are reading emails written by people for people. Invest the time and resources necessary to get your content right and ensure the customer feels valued and appreciated. They’ll then be far more likely and willing to engage.
Need to Improve Email Engagement? You Need SmartMail
At SmartMail, we believe that businesses not receiving 35% of their total sales from emails are missing out! And we know that our email engagement experts can help your business deliver just that.
To find out how to improve your email engagement or simply explore the different engagement metrics that might work best for you, contact our team today. We’ll even throw in a free email audit just for you! Click here to find out more.
