Inboxes are crowded with emails and often important emails get shrouded in promotional and marketing emails. Its quiet bugging isn’t it? So think from the customer’s perspective; why would customers open your email? Even if they do why would they care to read it? Email engagement is at the crux of marketing. If you don’t have your customer’s attention, transitioning into engagement becomes tough. So while you plan your email marketing calendar with your team, brainstorm the ways to increase email engagement.
To make your job easier we have some unique pointers for you:
1. Know your customer
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a boon to marketing. It has almost all the information about customers; from gender, location, preferences, important dates of their life, and various characteristics, which are often shared by them. But, this information is often not used efficiently. You need to take a step further than just mentioning first names or company names in the body of the email. The best way to personalize is to collate all the data; especially the data that reveals about what the customer does on your site?
2. What’s your objective?
What is your objective for sending an email? What response do you expect from customers? You want customers to visit your website, engage with your Facebook page, or explore discount offers? Let the call to action in the email be obvious, clear, easy to find and understand. Let the call out box be linked, colored or outlined or use contrast color to make it stand out. When you keep the call to action as simple as possible the click-through rates increase.
3. Be bold
Most emails as we mentioned earlier are not read, people just scan through emails and later read them if they are interested. But, when your content is bold and above all dynamic, you catch the attention of distracted customers. Create content which is based on the time customers open their email. You can also base your email content on the actions customer take. Always have a bold approach and project bold content; this gives you the opportunity to convert a customer and have a lasting impression.
4. Social sharing
Emails should have social sharing buttons; because customers explore more about your company and its offerings through social networking sites. Customers often forward messages to friends and they can do it through Facebook. Give them the opportunity to like and follow your brand. Email engagement increases when you publish email campaigns on social networks.
5. App-ly it
Most companies have mobile apps to promote special offers, coupons, and alerts to customers. Device targeting is a rather direct and easy way of promoting app downloading. Customers open your email on a particular type of mobile device. So you need to change app downloading option that is displayed in the message. When you send iTunes link while the customer is an Android user and needs Google Play store it leads to the poor user experience.
Finally, to pull the customer into app environment, remember that you need to combine device type with app type. Sending reminders about the benefits of using the app can encourage them to use the app.
6. Analyze it
Email metrics helps to know the effectiveness of your email campaigns and fine tune to improve them. Study the total messages sent, delivered, open rate, hard and soft bounces, response rate, click-through rate and unsubscribers. Also, the sent and delivered message along with hard and soft bounces reveal the efficiency of email deliverability.
Open rate shows the initial interest rate of the customer. Click-through rate tells the interest of the customer in the message and how effectively you managed to convert the initial interest into action. The response rate is how many customers showed the desired response divided by messages delivered. It is the ultimate measure of the effectiveness of your email campaign.
Unsubscriber rate tells how your campaign holds the interest of your subscriber over a long period. Also, over a span of time, if the customers don’t like the emails you send, they would unsubscribe. Once you use these metrics; you start to develop and understand the response you can expect and catch the shortcomings of the campaigns.
Customer engagement in email marketing becomes the core of all email marketing campaigns and therefore, to decode the secret of its success you need to analyze the campaign. Contact Juvlon to understand the art of storytelling in email marketing which boosts email engagement.