Improve Email Engagement: 8 Ways to Get More Opens, Reads, and Clicks
If you’ve ever received a dull email in your inbox, you know how hard it is for a message to capture and hold your interest. It’s the same way with your readers and customers—they get many emails competing for their attention.
So how do you get their attention? It’s not easy, and creating quality emails is a skill that must be honed over time. However, the right set of guidelines can give you a solid base upon which to build better engagement metrics and lower acquisition costs.
Here are the essential tips you need to elevate your messages from the rest of the inbox and improve email engagement:
1. Select the Right Email Cadence
Selecting the right cadence for your emails is a balancing act that can have a significant effect on engagement. Send emails too often and readers will stop paying attention; send too infrequently and they won’t remember you.
Your sending frequency is dependent on your industry and customer base, so the goal is to understand your customers, consider how often they’d want to hear from you, and test to find the right cadence.
If you’re working with an experienced media vendor, ask for their opinion. They will be able to help guide you toward a schedule that maximizes returns and provides the best customer experience.
2. Set Up a Preference Center
A best practice is to set up a “preference center,” where the subscriber can control the frequency at which they wish to engage with your brand. These can prove valuable, by helping reduce attrition. Too many mailers only offer this option once the user is already in the process of unsubscribing—at which point, the relationship has already been too impacted to retain the subscriber.
3. Stay Consistent
No matter your cadence or content, consistency is key. Consistency provides the best reader experience and helps achieve results, while accurately measuring performance. Select a schedule and stick to it until you have enough data to support a change.
4. Make Each Email Unique
Ensure each email in your sequence is unique. Not all readers will open every email, but that doesn’t mean you should repeatedly send the same content. The price you’ll pay in disengaged recipients far outweighs the benefits of a few more views.
5. Execute on Your Promise
During the sign up and onboarding sequence, you should have explained to readers what to expect, in terms of content type and regularity. Deliver on your promise, without deviation.
6. Deliver Incremental Value
Not every email should be a product or sales pitch. Deliver ancillary content that provides value to the prospect. For example, if you sell gardening supplies, include relevant tips and information to make a gardener more successful, such as a planting schedule guide, or a list of plants that perform best by geographic region.
By not making every interaction a sales ask, you build a relationship and instill trust rather than fulfill a one-time, transactional need that causes the subscriber to easily forget your brand.
7. Make Your Messages Concise
Remember to keep your messages concise. A good rule of thumb for content length is to make sure your email is no longer than two scrolls. If they are, ask yourself whether the content would work better as two separate messages. Remember, a high percentage of your readers will likely consume your content on a mobile device. If you often find yourself writing long emails, consider shortening them, and increasing how often you send them out.
8. Personalize Emails Using Segmentation
If you have a diverse customer base and wide variety of products and services, segmentation—separating your contacts into groups based on a set of characteristics—will help provide a better customer experience, while increasing campaign performance.
For example, a clothing company would do well to separate contacts based on gender to promote relevant collections. On the other hand, a direct-to-consumer company with only one offering will send the same content to their entire customer base, as segmentation won’t drive any performance improvement.
When appropriate, segmentation improves performance by enabling a marketing message to focus on a more precise interest or desire, which increases sales.
If you keep these eight tips in mind, you’ll be well on your way to improving content quality and keeping readers engaged. For more help growing your email database with quality subscribers, contact us. We specialize in driving scalable customer acquisition, while maintaining front-end metrics and driving back-end results.