5 tips on how to improve your email engagement

Over 100 billion emails are sent and received every day, but how many of those emails achieve key business goals? From an email marketing point of view, how many businesses measure key engagement features from emails that are sent to subscribers; click rates, sales, leads and open rates – getting these right can impact on engagement and lead to a better conversion rate.

Here are 5 tips on how to improve email engagement:

1. Be regular – sending email more regularly will result in more engagement with your site. Are you regularly sending emails each month? Are your emails targeted enough? Are you taking advantage of seasonal trends within your niche, and can you take advantage of these to drive more sales?

2. Discounts – Evidence suggests the better the offer/discount in an email, the more it will get used, thus impacting on sales/enquires. For example, a 40% discount is likely to perform better than a 10% one. Obviously, profit margin and time of send need to be carefully considered here.

3. Subject – Email subject lines are one of the most important elements of email marketing – an unappealing subject can lead to low open rates. After all, you’ve spent all that time creating and building the email you want to ensure your subject is appealing enough to get opened! To achieve optimum open rates, generally something vague but appealing seems to drive the best open rate – e.g. ‘Get your Easter surprise…’ or ‘You need to see these trainers!’ entices the user to open and find out what the surprise is. Using a discount directly in the email will drive good open rates, however, unless the offer is appealing/substantial enough, subscribers may deem it as a sales tactic rather than providing something useful.

4. Optimise day/time of send – Analyse your data carefully over time, send email at varying days and time’s; certain niches are likely to be different here. If you have subscribers located in different parts of the world – time of send should be considered, e.g. the UK and the U.S have completely different time zones, you may find that sending email in the evening works better for the UK, but not for the U.S.

5. Use prominent banners for key messaging – prominent banners used in emails tend to drive the highest click percentage, so this is where you should push home your key message. Make sure the banner links to a relevant page on your website with a clear call to action. For example, you may be pushing a particular piece of content/service – this should link directly to the page, then carefully think about what you might use as a call to action – what do you want people to do after reading the content? Use the call to action in a prominent area so it’s easy to access.

Summary

Email is a powerful way of staying in touch with your customers. Getting it right can have an extremely positive impact on business growth. If you are interested in finding out about email marketing, why not contact us for a chat!