Don’t Get Trashed – Engage Your Email List!

6 Min Read

Email marketing.

When done right, it’s an incredibly powerful tool for moving your business forward.

When done wrong, however, it can drive potential customers away for good.

So how do you make sure your email list is a powerful marketing tool for your business?

It’s all about keeping your email subscribers engaged. And by following the strategies outlined below, you can ensure that your list stays engaged for the long haul.

Let’s dive in.

  1. Focus on Personalization

When you’re sending a subscriber an email, it’s important to understand that you’re competing with several other businesses for their attention.

A recent study showed that a typical subscriber receives up to 11 commercial emails every day. So without personalization, your chances of standing out are slim to none.

Most email marketers realize this. In fact, 38% of marketers say that improving email personalization was their #1 goal.

But how exactly do you do it? Here’s a few tips that will help:

  1. Segment Your Email Lists. By segmenting your list, you ensure that your emails are as targeted and personalized as possible.
  2. Personalize Your Subject Lines. If a subscriber isn’t opening your email, it’s impossible to engage them. By focusing on personalization, you can ensure you’re standing out amongst the dozens of other emails they’re getting every day.
  3. Customize the Sender Name. Changing the email sender name to a real person is more effective than emails sent from a company name. You may also want to test combining a name with the company name so the recipient knows who it’s coming from.

Personalization is the future of email marketing. More and more data about consumers is collected every day and marketers are using this data to deliver highly personalized content via email. Email automation platforms, like Campaign Monitor, are leading the charge in this direction. Recently, Campaign Monitor acquired customer data platform, Tagga, with the intention to provide customers with the ability to create individual profiles of their customer’s data.

For example, a travel brand could see customers who have purchased travel packages from them in the past and have searched for a trip to Hawaii within the last 30 days but did not purchase. They could then send them a discount for their next trip to Hawaii if they purchase in the next 10 days.

While focusing on personalization can dramatically help with engagement rates, it isn’t the only strategy at your disposal.

  1. Use Call-to-Actions

Even if your subscribers do open your email and read it, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re engaged.

Real engagement is about getting them excited about your brand and coercing them to interact with your website. That’s why a call-to-action is so important.

When creating a CTA for your emails, there are a few things you’ll want to focus on. They include:

  1. Placement. Test different options to determine the optimal placement for your CTA (above the fold, middle of email, end of email).
  2. Design. Creating a button with a unique color can help significantly increase conversion rates.
  3. Copy. Having a button that says “Contact Us” isn’t going to cut it. Be relatable and create a short, action-inducing CTA that’s relevant to the recipient.

If engagement is your goal, identifying a high-converting CTA is crucial.

  1. Ask Questions

If you want to be successful with your email marketing campaigns, the content of your emails needs to be audience-centric.

That means it needs to be focused on the audience and what they want (not what your company wants).

So what’s the best way to find out what your list wants? Ask them.

Whether it’s how often they’d like to receive emails, when they’d like to receive them, or what type of content they want when they receive them, asking your subscribers directly is the best way to ensure you’re giving them what they want.

Another great way to learn what your subscribers like and don’t like it to send surveys in your emails. Survey platforms like GetFeedback allow you to embed surveys directly into your email to learn all about each subscriber. This data can then be used to further personalize future communications across all channels.

Go Forth and Engage

While there are many other strategies that you can use to engage your email list, the tactics outlined above offer a great head start.

Go forth and engage your list. Your marketing success depends on it.

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