Three Ways to Increase the Engagement of Your Marketing Emails

Great email marketing is all about engagement. How many people open your emails? How many skim through and how high is your click rate? These are questions you have to ask yourself if you’re looking to boost the performance of your marketing emails. Once you find out what needs improvement, you can tweak your tactics and achieve better results. Today, let’s look at three of these tactics and see how you can easily apply them yourself.

Are subscribers receiving your emails?

Before we can even talk about open rates, we have to bring up deliverability. That is the number of subscribers who are receiving your emails. If your email list is messy, some of the people you think you’re communicating with may never hear from you. So, first things first: if you want to boost engagement, first you have to boost deliverability.

The most effective way to do that is by checking your list for accuracy. You can do that easily with the help of an email checker. These services are fast and will get your list back in shape without you putting in much effort.

However, make sure you find a great email checker. One that removes misspelled and fake email addresses, spam traps, catch-all and known complainers. All this bad data is sabotaging your deliverability, so weed it out without hesitation. 

Are you informing, inspiring and entertaining?

Email content is crucial to your engagement. If your marketing emails read like marketing emails, you know something needs to change. Start by asking yourself how your friends, or yourself, would improve your content. Get as much honest feedback as you can, and then proceed to make adjustments.

The ultimate purpose of your marketing emails is for them to help you increase sales. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean you have to bombard your subscribers with aggressive messages. Instead, take a break from this approach for a while and make inbound marketing your core strategy. 

How do you do that? Strive to be helpful and inform your subscribers about things that would make their lives and businesses better. Aim to inspire and entertain. Send people useful articles and videos. Use humor in your emails. Make it your goal to get people excited to get your emails – and click on them!

Spend more time on your subject lines

Subject lines are crucial to the success of your marketing emails. Just like you and I, most people decide whether they want to open an email by taking a glance at its subject line. If it’s not enticing enough, your message may end up unopened and even deleted. So, you can see why taking more time to work on your subject lines pays off. 

What makes a good subject line? It depends on who you ask, but most people would tell you that a clickable subject line has to:

• inform: it should sum up the content of your email, so people know what to expect.

• entice: pique your subscribers’ interest and make clicking irresistible.

Before you hit the Send button, take a minute to ask yourself if the subject line does these two things. Also, try coming up with several versions of your subject line and get feedback from your colleagues and friends. The one that gets the most votes is your winner.

Bonus tips to help you increase the engagement of your marketing emails:

• segment your email list by using information such as the gender, location and purchase history of your subscribers.

• avoid using spam trigger words in your subject line. Words like “money,” “buy,” “cash” or even “success” affect your deliverability.

• once an email checker isolates abuse emails from your list, stop emailing them. You don’t want to communicate with people who believe you’re a spammer.

• don’t be afraid to make your emails more personal. Storytelling is a powerful tactic. Make the most of it. 

• email your list consistently. Show up often in your subscribers’ inboxes. The more discipline you have in sending your marketing emails, the more engagement you’ll see.