6 Tips to Drive Customer Engagement With Email Marketing
Compared to average customers, engaged and loyal customers can help boost a company’s revenue by 23%, according to a recent Gallup survey. Here, you’ll find some great ways to increase customer engagement through your email marketing.
How many times have you done a Google search and clicked through to find irrelevant, low-quality information? Or been baited to click on a social media headline, only to be disappointed by the content? That type of marketing may get a click, but it doesn’t engage users or succeed in building a strong relationship with prospects and customers.
The same is true for email campaigns: Engaging your email subscribers is vital in terms of encouraging prospects to become loyal customers and increasing brand revenue.
Measuring Email Engagement Metrics
Email-marketing engagement also impacts your email deliverability, determining if your emails will actually land in subscribers’ inboxes. To measure email engagement, Internet service providers (ISPs) — such as Gmail, Yahoo, Comcast, AOL, and Outlook.com — use custom algorithms.
The following are some of the major email engagement metrics used in those ISP algorithms. You can also use these key performance indicators (KPIs) to let you know whether or not your emails are successfully engaging subscribers:
Positive Engagement Metrics:
- Email Open Rate — What does the open rate of your email indicate? Keep in mind that your email will only be counted as opened if the images are downloaded by your subscribers who have their images automatically turned off
- Clicks — Number of subscribers who click links in your emails
- This Is Not Spam Data — When subscribers indicate that they want to receive your emails by clicking the “This Is Not Spam” link
- Saving emails to folders — This involves moving an email from the inbox to a primary folder.
Negative Email-Marketing Engagement Metrics:
- Unsubscribe rate — The number of subscribers who click the Unsubscribe button on your emails
- Spam rate — The number of subscribers who mark your emails as spam
- Delete without opening — The number of subscribers who instantly and repeatedly delete your emails before opening them.
What Is Reach in Marketing?
Reach marketing definition: Email reach rate is another metric that can also be used to measure email-marketing engagement. In terms of email, marketing reach refers to the total number of people exposed to an email during a given period. Open reach is similar to the email open rate; however, what’s different is that the number of email opens are measured over a period of time. For example, the open reach would be the number of customers who opened at least one email during the first quarter of the year. So, when optimizing your marketing reach, your goal would be to get at least one email open per customer versus the highest number of email opens per email send.
6 Tips for Encouraging Email Engagement
How do you drive email marketing engagement in your campaigns? These 6 tips are a great way to start:
- Convey value in your subject lines — If subscribers are trashing your emails before opening them, it means that they’re looking at the subject line (combined with the sender address) and determining that the email content is not relevant to their needs. So, be sure your subject line conveys the value of the content in your email message. Click here for a subject line cheat sheet that offers 10 tips for boosting your email open rates.
- Personalize your content and offers — If your open rates start out high with new subscribers and fall precipitously, your email content and offers are not meeting their expectations. When emailing customers, personalization is one of the most important ways to keep subscribers opening and engaging with your emails. This can include using your customers’ names in the subject line and email message, as well as creating content that targets individual preferences (e.g., product recommendations based on previous purchases).
- Segment your email lists — In addition to using the subscriber’s name, segmenting your email list based on such factors as demographics, geographics, purchase history, and website browsing behavior can help maximize the relevance of your email content and offers for each subscriber.In a recent study, MailChimp compared segmented campaigns to the same email marketers’ unsegmented email campaigns. Email-marketing segmentation:
- Increased email opens by 14.31%
- Increased clicks by 100.95%
- Decreased unsubscribe rates by 9.37%
- Decreased bounce rates by 4.65%.
Plus, the Direct Marketing Association found that segmentation increased email-marketing campaign revenue by 760% compared to sending one-size-fits-all campaigns.
For email segmentation best practices that can help boost your email-marketing engagement and drive more revenue, check out this NewsLever article: “Email-Marketing List Segmentation—Give a Lift to Your ROI With These 5 Best Practices.”
- Create calls to action that convert — The calls to action in your emails are the entrance to your sales funnel. Can your subscribers easily spot them? Does the button copy motivate a click? Check out this previous NewsLever article for eight essential best practices to design powerful calls to action that convert.
- Optimize for mobile — If you’re not using responsive design to optimize your emails for mobile, then your subscriber engagement metrics are likely suffering. Click on the following links for:
- Automate your emails — Marketing automation combines strategy and software to help you create more relevant and personalized email campaigns. A/B testing, personalization, and dynamic content are just a few examples of automation features that can be used to help boost email engagement. Find out more here about why automation is an effective tool for managing email communications based on subscriber engagement, as well how to use automation to streamline your email campaigns.
How are your email campaigns performing? If you think your emails could do a better job of engaging subscribers, FulcrumTech can help. (Check out our case studies to see some examples of FulcrumTech client success stories!) Contact us to find ways to improve both your email engagement metrics and email-marketing return on investment.