How to make Emails more engaging ?

The world today is dominated by social media, mobile apps, and smartphone technologies. There are countless ways you can connect with your customers, but just one channel continues to perform well year after year, and that is email marketing.

According to news reports, email generates $44 for every $1 spent, which is an astounding 3,800% ROI, making it one of the most profitable and effective marketing tools available.

Currently, 60% of Americans use Facebook, 35% of Americans use Instagram. However, over 90% of Americans use their email! That’s a huge audience! 

Are you still thinking email is dead? Not even close!

If you are putting time and effort into your email marketing campaigns, it must be in your routine as well to pay attention, whether people are opening the emails you are sending. After all, if no one is reading your messages, you’re just wasting time and valuable resources. Reason? Mailing the right emails at the wrong time to the wrong prospects, will make your subscribers opt-out of your email list, or maybe even worse. Chances are they can move to your competitors!

It’s depressing!

Does it feel like a big challenge to get people to open and read your emails?

It doesn’t necessarily need to be tough! If you send the right emails at the right time to the right prospects. You will create a lifetime brand promoter for your business. You need to sound smart; your approach and body of the content should be informative and personalized enough to persuade the recipient to not only pay attention but engage in your recommendation or request.

As of any marketing channel, marketing strategies change and shift over time. Things that worked last year, doesn’t necessarily work this year. So, if you have got people to open your emails, what next? How do you keep them engaged? What’s the best way to increase customer engagement rates? 

Stop racking your brain and follow these six essential tips to make sure your email is engaging and effective before you hit the send button. 

1. Make Sure to Send a Traditional Welcome Email

This must seem to you pretty basic and obvious, but it’s one of the best email marketing practices for engaging prospects. Welcome emails are the mails where you thank visitors for joining your company newsletter and pace expectations for what’s to come. This will be your first opportunity to introduce yourself and tell them more about your business. If your introduction to a new prospect isn’t memorable, any other emails you send won’t be either. Write your welcome email in a fun, humorous way as you write to your friends or colleagues. Avoid using more of the corporate language. An example of the most popular email by Derek Sivers, that produced MILLIONS, would be enough to understand this point. Nobody had ever written an email like it before. 

Derek Sivers founded a company called CD Baby. He rewrote the automatic email that was sent to customers after they purchased a CD. Initially, the email said, “Hey, your CD has been shipped.”

Here is the email, have a look! 

2. Make a Good First Impression with an Enticing Subject Line

Your subject line is your first impression, and if it is bad, it can likely be your last as well. If you received an email with the subject line ‘“A WEBINAR FOR EVERYONE…CHECK OUT UPCOMING WEBINARS!”  How excited would you be to open it? You wouldn’t even be reading the body line.

Repetitive much? Not only is this subject line boring but it uses webinars twice. To create customer engagement, its always good to use simple direct human language without getting too technical. Strong subject lines are short, descriptive, and promising so that people scanning your emails read the entire subject line. Research suggests keeping your subject line fewer than 50 characters. 

"Treat your subject line like the movie trailer – give a preview so they know what to expect."

To stand out of the subscribers’ list, these days marketers are effectively using emojis in their subject lines to attract prospects with the relevant subject. Most personalized and humanized strategy to engage with the recipients.

56% of brands using an emoji in their email subject line had a higher open rate than those that did not. (Forbes, 2017).

3. Add a Personal Touch to Increase Click-through Rate

Remember the personalization, we mentioned earlier? Unless you have established brand trust, you should be talking to your prospect as a human and not as a company name. This is because you are trying to get readers to know, like, and trust you. One way to add personalization to your emails is to make your subscribers feel like you're talking directly to them, and not just one of the hundreds of other people. 

Stop sending emails from addresses without human names in them. Anonymity does not work and buyers don’t look at the emails coming from marketing company names.  Address your prospects or subscribers by their first name in the subject line or at the beginning of your email body. Everyone loves the sound of their names. Sending emails with the personalized approach will hook and engage your prospects for a longer period. There's more than one noteworthy thing about this email below, what all can you notice? What better example can be to understand how to engage your subscribers with such personalized email.

As a marketer, you should practice using more data in a deliberate way for personalization in content execution. It’s all about sending targeted content to those who want it most. It will assist you in putting your clients into records in light of client socioeconomic preferences, and other rich information about your existing and potential customers. Learning more about the people who sign up to your list can help increase engagements and build stronger relationships as well as target subscribers based on their interests.