8 Ways to increase your Email Engagement rate
Email Campaigns are essential to an effective Marketing Strategy, providing a valuable touch point to potential and current customers. But touch points can only be so effective when your contacts are not engaging with your emails. The obvious consequence of this is that your emails will be less effective in converting a potential customer and maybe even lose them as a subscriber. The worst possible consequence of a low engagement rate is that less of your emails make it through spam filters to be delivered to your other contacts.
So how can we go about preventing this and improving your email engagement rate?
1. Check and analyse your Analytics
This tip may seem obvious at first if you’re already a marketer, but it can be easy to overlook simpler solutions to problems when you’re aware of the more advanced ones. It’s good to remember that you can learn all you need to know about how engaging your emails are through your analytics. With every email campaign you send, you should be checking the analytics and noting what worked and what didn’t. By doing this, you can see what works at engaging your audience and what doesn’t.
2. Teach your Audience something useful
Human’s love learning new things, it’s the reason our species have evolved the way we have. Teaching people new things is a guaranteed way to capture their interest. Whether that’s through a quick one sentence statistic or answering a question that a lot of people have about your business, they will be extremely interested in what you have to say after that. From there you can direct them to a Blog expanding on that topic or to an appropriate page on your website, increasing that engagement rate! Educational YouTubers have been very successful with a technique similar to this called “Reverse Clickbait”, in which the creator puts a question in the video title only to answer it in the thumbnail. Something about the non-sequitur nature of this approach seems to capture people’s interests and get them ask “Well, why?”. When your Audience starts to ask that, you’ve got ’em 😉
3. Celebrate THEIR Achievements
You know how Spotify gives you a “your year wrapped” at the end of every year, telling you how much you listened to that one artist that you told all your friends you didn’t like? Well okay maybe that last part is just me but the annual Spotify Wrapped is a great example of celebrating people’s achievements. It doesn’t need to be a serious achievement, even wishing someone a happy birthday and giving them a special offer is a great way to increase engagement with your emails and make your business appear more relatable.
4. Use Social Proof
Speaking of “more relatable”, one of the most effective sales tactics is letting a potential customer know that other people before them have tried your product or service before. Studies have shown that 70% of people check product reviews before making a purchase. This is even more prevalent when it comes to higher priced items and services so being able to share genuine proof of a customer enjoying what you have to offer, can massively affect your engagement rate. You can do this by providing customer testimonials and video testimonials in your emails.
5. Make your emails personal
Personalising your emails is a great way to get through the spam filter at the very least and can be used to massively increase engagement on your email campaigns. At the very simplest, you can include the recipient’s name in an email and build up personalised content from there. Doing this will mean that they’re more likely to click on links because you’ve shown them content that they’re actually interested in.
6. Add movement to your emails
Still images are very easy to make look good these days and, as a result, the market is oversaturated with good imagery. Creating moving imagery (such as animated gifs) will help your emails stand out from competitors and will catch your audiences’ eyes better. Humans have evolved to see movement and aren’t actually used to seeing still images. This is why moving imagery is so effective in getting a better open rate and a better engagement rate.
7. Be Helpful, not just promotional
You’d be surprised how many businesses forget that their purpose is to benefit their customers and not just focus on what they sell. While this is great for a catalogue, not every customer is signing up to receive purely sales emails. Focusing on sales on a customer who is not warm enough to consider buying from you is a great way to help them lose interest in your business and click that unsubscribe button. Providing helpful information or a helpful guide, will give potential customers evidence that they can trust you and that they can benefit from your services. The great part about this is that you can create a variety of different resource types for all types of customers! But we can get to that specifically another day 👀
8. Send targeted recommendations
While this requires a little more work when it comes to segmentation, this is a great strategy to really hit at what recipients are interested in. Retargeting ads work in a similar way but with the hope that people will notice the ad. With an email, you’re sending this content directly to them. Not only can this be more effective in some cases, but it will also dramatically increase your engagement rate. You don’t even need to go as complicated as to retarget contacts with product recommendations based on what they’ve been looking at. A simple “abandoned cart” reminder works great for customer who have thought about buying but left the checkout area for whatever reason.
In conclusion…
Increasing engagement across any platform is difficult, and with the oversaturation of the email market, it has not gotten any easier. However, there are ways to increase engagement with your email campaigns that can massively affect the way customers perceive your business. I highly recommend you try a few of these tactics out for yourself and see what results you get back. While you can do all the market research you want before deciding on a campaign to send out, sometimes you just need a little experimentation!
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Autus provide Revenue Growth Platforms, Marketing & Sales Automation and Digital Marketing services to help sales and marketing personnel and teams build efficient and effective sales and marketing best practices and automate their marketing and sales processes by leveraging personalised content, various digital marketing tactics, segmentation and behaviour of their prospects and customers.
Autus recommend various products for automation, such as Active Campaign, Hubspot, Mailchimp and SharpSpring…it will vary on your requirements and budget the best option for your business.
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Our founder, Tom Berry, also provides selective fractional CMO services and is a member of some client boards.
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If our team at Autus can help advise further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our founder, Tom Berry.
