Let’s face it: growing a community that interacts with your emails isn’t easy. People’s inboxes are crowded. Recent statistics show that the average person gets around 121 emails every day. How can you increase your chances to stand out and connect with your audience? These three simple tactics will show you how to boost your email marketing engagement and leverage your business.
First, what does good email marketing engagement look like?
If you’re reading this article, you may feel like your emails aren’t getting enough engagement. While that may be true, taking a look at some solid email marketing benchmarks paints a clearer picture of how you’re performing.
To help marketers see where they stand, MailChimp analyzed hundreds of millions of emails. They revealed that the average open rate, across all industries, is 20.81%. Also, they discovered that people care very much about their hobbies – this industry gets the highest click-through rate (4.78%).
How do you compare?
If your reports are way below these numbers, don’t worry. There are plenty of ways to fix that! Is your email marketing engagement higher than the average? Then these tips will help you get even better results.
Hiring an email checker will get your list in tip-top shape
The first thing you need to look into, if your engagement rates don’t make sense, is the quality of your email list.
Having invalid email addresses in your database will cause your emails to bounce. Moreover, catch-all emails and spam traps affect your deliverability, as well. Although they look like real email addresses, they will only tarnish your sender reputation.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) look at your sender reputation just like someone who’s about to do business with you. They want to make sure you’re a legitimate email sender, so they can decide the destination of your emails.
When you acquire too many bad email addresses, ISPs will start delivering your emails in people’s Spam folder. Sometimes, when your list is really messy, your emails won’t even make it to Spam. As a result, your engagement rates will be inaccurate, which means you won’t even know if your email marketing works.
Enter: the email checker. A piece of software that removes bad emails from your list. Misspelled addresses, dormant and catch-all accounts, role based and temporary emails, spam traps and users who have a habit of marking messages as Spam – all gone!
Email checkers are easy to use and highly efficient if you pick the right service. You upload your email list on the platform and get it back in tip-top shape. Some services even allow you to check emails one by one, at no cost. If you don’t have a large list, you can try a free email verifier to see how it works.
Then, you can focus on other ways to boost your email marketing engagement!
Reconsider your copy: would you click on your own emails?
It’s hard to put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes and answer this question honestly. Most of the time, we’re so involved in creating our marketing content that we don’t see what’s wrong, or missing, from our emails.
But try this exercise the next time you write a newsletter or marketing email.
- Look at your subject line – does it do your content justice? Does it inform your reader while at the same time entice her to click?
- Then, read your email out loud – does it sound natural, like something you’d say to a person you know? Is there any fluff you could cut out?
- Finally, pay attention to your call-to-action (CTA) – does it make you want to click? Could you use a better formula to say the same thing?
Being honest about the quality of your content is the first step to improve it. If assessing it is too hard for you, ask your colleagues and friends for feedback. As a rule of thumb, never send any emails that you wouldn’t like to receive yourself.
Here are a few other tips to help you improve your content and boost your email marketing engagement:
- look at the brands and people you admire the most – how does their content sound? What tactics could you implement in your own email marketing? Learn from the best, but remember to stay true to your voice.
- read more articles on content marketing and copywriting. There are so many great resources online, and many of them are free. Make the most of them!
- consider asking advice from a copywriter. Sometimes, two or three sessions with a professional are enough to help you discover your style and write better emails.
Show up
Remember when your fitness trainer told you that “consistency is key” if you want to get (and stay) in shape? You don’t have a fitness trainer? Neither do I, but I know the same applies to email marketing.
Showing up is a golden rule to follow if you want to boost your engagement.
There are several benefits of emailing your subscribers regularly:
- remember ISPs? We talked about them ealier. One of the things they like the most is a steady, predictable sending behavior. So, send your emails on the same day. Also, don’t take ISPs by surprise by sending higher batches of emails at once. Increase your volumes gradually, otherwise your deliverability, and engagement rates, will suffer.
- another benefit of emailing consistently is that your Spam complaints will decrease. You’ll become a familiar presence in people’s inboxes, so why would they hit the Spam button?
- furthermore, the fact that they’re going to get your emails on time will help you foster a closer relationship with them. Soon enough, people will come to expect your emails and be excited to see them.
Now we can talk about real email marketing engagement – emails your subscribers can’t wait to click on!
Setting a sending schedule and sticking to it is going to pay off in the long run. So will keeping a neat list and constantly adjusting your content to fit your audience’s interests.