10 Ways to Improve Your Email Engagement

We all know how flooded the average email inbox is today. And while email marketing remains one of the most effective tools in the marketing toolbox, millions of emails go unnoticed, unopened, and unread every day.

So how can you avoid such a sad fate for your emails? And what can you do to increase email engagement and get the coveted clicks on your CTA buttons?

Read on for ten things to do to increase your email engagement and keep your emails from hitting the trash.

10 Ways To Improve Email Engagement

1. Always send a welcome email.

The first email you send to a customer is usually a welcome email. The average welcome email open rate is 50%, which makes it much more effective than regular newsletters.

When we consider that 76% of people expect a welcome email immediately after subscribing to your list, obviously that email is important. So make the most of it.

Really Good Emails shares a great collection of welcome emails (and every other category you can think of) to inspire your strategy, including this excellent example from Postable. It provides the discount code subscribers are waiting for, has nice graphics, and keeps things super simple.

2. Optimize your subject lines.

47% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. So yes, the correct subject line is crucial.

But what makes a good subject line?

The best way to succeed is to use natural human tendencies such as:

• curiosity
• FOMO (fear of missing out)
• humor

This is a typical FOMO subject line where GetResponse makes it clear to its audience that it risks missing out on a whopping 40% off.

3. Don’t neglect the preheader text.

The pre-header or preview text is the snippet of text that follows the email subject line when a reader views your email in their inbox. It will appear next to the subject line and the sender name.

These examples from the Cult Beauty beauty marketplace provide a preview of the brands and discounts it is offering to drive clicks:

This snippet is valuable real estate and can even improve or degrade the performance of your email. Studies show that brands using preview text are effective in increasing their open rates by up to 30%.

4. Prioritize your CTAs.

The way you write and design your CTAs or CTAs has a significant impact on email engagement and click-through rates. Since readers are used to being asked to and do so, creativity is crucial in order not to get filtered out.

Experiment with everything from text and design to placement and frequency to see which type of CTAs and buttons will work best with your specific audience.

This message from the email marketing software Emma keeps it short and sweet with a CTA that arouses the reader’s curiosity with the clever and uncomplicated text “See how”.

5. Write casual, entertaining texts.

Write while you speak. Nobody likes big, boring, jargon-heavy blocks of text. Make it easy, fun, and rewarding to read your email. And be clear about what next step the reader should take.

Use active, positive language and keep sentences short and to the point. And use humor where appropriate; People like to smile.

This email copy from Uber is creative, branded, and to the point:

6. Use your transactional emails.

After welcome emails, transactional emails have one of the highest open rates of any email marketing message. Yet they rarely contain more information than the actual transaction. That means an opportunity for you.

By adding extra love and attention to your transactional emails, you will amaze your customers in ways that many companies miss out on.

7. Run A / B tests.

Whenever you send email, be sure to do A / B testing. You can test every element of your email, from subject lines and preview tests to text, images, design and CTAs.

The more you test, the better you get to know your target audience. And the better you know your audience, the more you can target them with your email.

8. Make sure your e-mail is responsive on the go.

Most people open email on their mobile device. This means that a huge chunk of it will be wasted if your emails don’t respond mobile.

Always make sure your design is as good or better on mobile than it is on desktop.

9. Personalize your emails for each recipient.

Customers are frustrated with brands that don’t create personalized experiences. For this reason, it is crucial to tailor your email marketing to the recipient.

An email that is not personalized risks more harm than good. In a marketing study, 82% of marketers saw a significant increase in open rates when using the personalization options.

Eventbrite sends these personalized emails with reports on how successful users’ events have been over the past year. This type of personalized content can also be a great way to encourage social sharing and engagement within a team, and to multiply the impact of your emails.

10. Segment your email marketing.

By segmenting your email list, you can send the right message to the right buyer personality at the right time in their buyer journey. And this is central for increasing conversions.

To send segmented emails with a higher chance of conversion, first integrate your email and marketing software with your CRM and other customer data sources.

So you have a 360-degree view of your contacts everywhere, including your email marketing platform. It will then be easier than ever to send highly personalized emails based on the groups, memberships and other characteristics of your contacts.

Better data means better email engagement

Email communication is one of the most effective ways to reach customers and prospects. But keeping your email lists up to date and personalizing your content can be a challenge.

This is where integration comes in: Synchronize the contact databases in your app stack so that you always work with fully enriched, current and relevant data.

When your CRM and email tool are in sync, you can automatically send new subscribers and leads to your email tool. You can also synchronize additional data in order to better segment your marketing and maintenance campaigns – and to enable easy, personalized contact in every email.

At the same time, you can return Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) with updated data for sales to your CRM – all without overwriting existing data.