How to Drive Engagement With Email Marketing

Be honest – how many marketing emails have you read in the last week? If you’re like most people, you’re great at ignoring. Based on that thought, you may be wondering why you should do email marketing at all. Here’s the thing: even if you’ve only read onemarketing email in the last week, this represents a significant win for the company who sent it. You’re much more likely to become a customer when you engage with this company’s email marketing campaign. How do you drive similar engagement with your email marketing efforts?

Here are our top 10 tips:

1. Write A Killer Subject Line
   Not literally, of course. But the subject line is a key part of your email. It doesn’t matter what you put into the email body if the user is not grabbed by the subject line, so it’s the most important part. Make your subject line:
   • Short – about 50 characters
   • Direct – leave ambiguity to the fiction writers and get to the point
   • Honest – don’t promise something that you then fail to deliver in the email
   • Urgent – encourage the user to act now

2. Optimize For Mobile
   More and more people use their smart phones to read their emails, so you should optimize your content for mobile. Make sure your email is well formatted and it looks nice on mobile devices (test on as many as you can).

3. Always Make It Personal
   You can achieve this by making a couple of simple changes. Firstly make sure the From email address is a real person, rather than noreply@ or admin@. Secondly address your email to the recipient by name.

4. Segment Your List
   To make your emails even more personal, segment your email lists as much as possible. This will allow you to better target your emails. The more directly relevant the information, the more chance you have of your readers taking action.

5. Use Video
   Video increases open rates on some emails by up to 19 percent. Use email in the subject line and then link to the video in the body of the email. Your click through rate on the email could increase by as much as 300 percent simply by adding a video.

6. Add Buttons To Your Call To Action
   Buttons attract the attention of your readers better than text so it will encourage better click through rates. If you can work with your web developer or designer to use buttons that match the color and style of your brand, even better. Try to avoid the generic “PayPal” buttons if you can.

7. Use A Consistent Look
   Building trust with your readers is essential. We’re bombarded with multiple messages every day through email, social media and other channels. This means you only have a few seconds to grab the attention of your readers. Making your emails – the subject line, design, content, etc – consistent will make your emails instantly familiar.

8. Add Social Buttons
   Social buttons increases your engagement so make sure to add the social icons to Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest in your emails. Of course, these social media buttons are only helpful if you monitor your social media. Don’t add these buttons if you’re never engaging or interacting on social media (this can hurt your brand).

9. Get The Timing Right
   The timing of your email can have a dramatic impact on its success. Never assume anything. Instead do thorough research, both by looking at results from other email marketing campaigns, and by testing your own.

10. Measure And Test
    Test everything that you do in your email marketing strategy, including the tips on this list. Test different subject lines, colors of call to action buttons, and personalized messages with A/B splitting. This will allow you to see what works so you can continually improve.

Improving your email marketing efforts is an ongoing process. But if you constantly test and tweak while striving to make your emails more personal, you’ll drive engagement and get more sales.