Strategies to Increase Email Engagement

Email Engagement Almost all marketers will utilize the email platform as a marketing channel to advertise or market products (product marketing) and/or business services (services marketing). Besides also using omnichannel media such as social media (social media marketing) and search engines (search engine marketing). Even so, often certain email marketing content will escape the attention or even be ignored by the audience, which can indirectly affect the value of business engagement emails.

Definition of Email Engagement

As the name suggests, email engagement refers to the measurement of how good or bad subscriber interactions as the target audience are with email marketing campaigns (email drip campaigns). Email engagement is very important for professional sales force teams and marketers who are responsible for email marketing. At they can estimate engagement on emails by monitoring common engagement metrics, such as:

1. The deliverability rate is the percentage of emails that reach your audience’s email inboxes, instead of ending up in the spam email folder.
2. The open rate is the percentage of the audience as email recipients who open email messages. The open rate does not take into account the amount of time the audience spends viewing and reading the email.
3. The click-through rate (CTR) is the number of clicks on impressions (the number of times the link and advertising campaign appears) that the email receives after the audience opens the email.
4. Click-to-open rate (CTOR) is the percentage of how many viewers click on a link or links in an email after opening it. Be it internal links, business links or backlinks.
5. Conversion rate is the total percentage of the audience that takes certain actions, such as making a purchase (buying cycle) after receiving an email or accessing email content to meet the needs of the audience while connected to the business (customer relations).
6. Click map is a feature in emails that can help marketers monitor the number of clicks on each link in the email. This feature allows marketers to clearly understand which parts of email content are most interesting to their audience.
7. The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of the number of viewers who unsubscribe or stop subscribing to emails because they think emails are no longer relevant or interesting.
8. Bounce rate in email is a number that shows the percentage of email page views by the audience without any follow-up action. In other words, the audience visits and views the content page, then immediately exits without seeing another page.

Best Strategies to Increase Email Engagement in 2023

By paying attention to the metrics above, marketing and sales teams have the opportunity to increase the chances of email messages being read and responded to by the audience immediately. Thus, companies can find prospective audience problems (customer pain points), then offer the best solutions to the audience (customer advocacy) for these problems (advocacy marketing concept). No matter what field or business niche the company runs, marketers can actually implement various ways or strategies to increase email engagement in every email campaign. Launching from the HubSpot site, here are five of the best ways to increase business email marketing engagement numbers.

1. Create Interesting Subject Lines and Preview Text

Basically, marketers cannot create optimal engagement emails without including a subject line or preview text. In a way, the subject lines and preview text will encourage the email recipient’s “first impression” regarding the entire contents of the email and are the determining factor whether the email will be opened by the audience or not.

Therefore, marketers must make attractive subject lines and preview text in the following ways.

• The number of words in subject lines ranges from 41-70 characters.
• Include numbers in the subject which gives a specific impression. Call it the year, discount percentage, or certain statistical numbers.
• Combines preheader text.
• Create a subject in the form of a question.
• Create a subject line that addresses the target audience’s problems (customer pain points).
• Implement personalization techniques that reflect the email content.
• Presenting a unique value proposition (unique value proposition).
• Arouse curiosity and FOMO (fear of missing out).

That way, the audience will want to know more about the contents of the email which will affect the increase in open rates.

2. Email List Segmentation

Today’s sales operations require a more targeted and personalized approach to brand engagement. This condition is in line with research from Campaign Monitor which explains that efforts to personalize and segment email campaigns can result in higher open rates and marketing success. That’s why marketers have to segment customers based on interests and the current stage of the customer journey. So, instead of sending email blasts to an entire list of subscribers, marketers should segment their target audience to ensure that they are delivering relevant content to their audience.

Categories that marketers can use to segment audiences are:

• Demographic data or buyer persona, for example location, age range, gender and industry.
• Types of consumers, for example new customers, loyal customers, or free trial customers.
• Engagement levels, for example users who are already engaged and users who are not active.
• Purchase or activity history.

3. Maximize Email Engagement Special Storytelling

The next strategy that marketers also need to consider is implementing storytelling in emails. In short, storytelling refers to creating a story related to consumer behavior or the behavior of email recipients who are also company customers. This technique is thought to have a profound effect on the human brain and behavior where it will elicit strong empathic audience responses to email content. For that, create email storytelling by:

• Combine interesting facts and graphics with important narratives in emails.
• Outline the main points of the email content.
• Use similes or metaphors to help tell the story that will be embedded in the email content.
• Create email content that is relevant to each email recipient audience.

4. Add Social Proof and Call-to-Action (CTA)

In addition, marketers must make sentences in the email content that can convince the audience to read the next sentence, until it finally reaches the closing part of the email. Our tips, create email content which always includes an interesting and convincing opening, social proof, and call-to-action (CTA). That is, present the email content with an attention-grabbing opening. Then, build a chain of supporting facts, sources, and benefits to build credibility and turn attention to interest. For example, by including testimonials and positive feedback from other customers. Finally, provide an alternative CTA that makes it easy for the audience to take the next step they want, for example subscribing or buying a product. That way, marketers can retain existing customers (customer retention) as well as get or acquire new customers (prospecting).

5. Add Interactive Video Engagement Emails

Marketers can also create and enhance a unique customer experience by adding video to the body of the email content. Like video marketing trends in general, this strategy also has great potential to attract target market interest and engagement through visual aspects (customer engagement). Therefore, create interesting and interactive video content which can be collaborated with interactive GIF content, games, polls and video quizzes.