Simple Ways to Increase Email Marketing Engagement
Once your email has been sent and has made its way through filtering and authentication, it finally lands in your recipient’s inbox. What happens next will depend on your email's overall content and design. Will the subject line be interesting enough to open? Once opened will it inspire the recipient to read it from top to bottom? Will the content be powerful enough to click on the CTA? It all depends on how relevant and engaging your message is to your client.
What is Email Engagement?
Email engagement is how recipients interact with your email. In a perfect world, your email’s engagement algorithm looks like this: your recipient opens the email, reads all of it, clicks a link, and follows a CTA thus, performing the desired action that the email was written for.
Unfortunately, many emails suffer client losses during one of these steps. Some don’t want to read a long bulky email, some will lose patience if your images take a long time to load, some may not find the CTA inspiring to clock on, and so on.
To understand how many recipients interact with the email and at what stage they lose interest, we use engagement metrics to look at the data, analyze it and apply it to our next outgoing email.
How to Measure Engagement?
The most important engagement metrics to look at after sending an email are as follows:
- Open Rate — The percentage of people who opened the email over the overall amount of emails sent. To calculate the open rate, only unique opens are included meaning that if one person opens an email multiple times, only the first open will be taken into account.
- Click-Through Rate — The percentage of people who clicked on the link in the email over the overall amount of emails sent.
- Conversion Rate — The percentage of people who accomplished the desired action (subscribed, bought a product/service, etc) over the total number of opened emails.
To increase email engagement you should strive to provide the content that works best for your target audience. The best way to come up with effective content is to test different versions of your email with your recipients.
Use A/B Content Testing
A/B testing (or split testing) is a great and somewhat underestimated tool in email marketing. When you conduct a split test, you send out an email with two different content versions or an email with two different subject lines, CTAs, etc. They are delivered randomly to different halves of your recipient list. After that, an analysis takes place to see which version performed better and had a higher engagement with recipients.
Benefits of Split Testing:
- Email campaign optimization;
- Data from real recipients;
- Email improvement before the campaign will start;
- The better email engagement level;
- Higher conversion rate.
Just by using A/B testing companies can shed light on their customer’s preferences, the effectiveness of their email design and content, and minimize the risk of launching a high stakes campaign.
Analyze Email Campaigns Over Time
If you don’t understand what your audience likes every email campaign sent will be a random hit or a miss. To mitigate this risk apart from testing and comparing campaigns before sending, it’s important to book a time to analyze the work you have already accomplished.
Comparing subject lines, templates, click-through rates, conversions and the content types that got you the most open rates will give you a precise understanding of how to build your next campaign and what practices won’t work for your target audience.
Here we’ve outlined some simple tricks that can increase your email engagement in no time.
Email Template Rules
Today brands have to fight for customer attention like never before. While everyone tries to use bright, fancy, and complex templates it’s important to think first, is this what really works best for my subscribers?
For starters, here are some ground rules for designing email newsletters that should be followed at all times…
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