Mastering email engagement is crucial if you want to make money with email marketing. It isn’t enough to just create email lists and fill them up with subscribers. You have to know how to keep these subscribers engaged and interested.
If you think about email marketing in general, it is an excellent way to reach many customers and prosper in your business. It’s different from search and social marketing because you’re “pushing” a piece of content their way. You’re not waiting for them to “pull” content from you.
The first thing you need to master is deliverability, so that they receive the email in the first place. The second thing you have to master is getting them to open your emails, and then to keep opening your emails. This is engagement.
Your engagement producing skills should be a mix of optimization, relevance, timing, personalization, targeting, responsiveness and deliverability. Below I will go through some of the ways to supercharge your email engagement.
Email personalization
This is a well-known marketing tactic and it involves using the customer’s data to make your emails more personal. That means that you write the email as if it were written for that specific person. You collect customer’s information such as birthday, gender, name, location, recent purchases and interests and then use this information in your email.
People are used to getting marketing messages, but when they see a personalized message they pay more attention to it. That’s why this tactic is so effective. Personalized emails are opened 250% more often and can drive to a conversion 600% more often. It is even stated that 73% of all customers would rather use a brand that uses personal information than one that doesn’t.
Nowadays, it’s really easy to make personalized emails. Just add the fields you want to use in the forms your customers fill in and you’ll get the relevant information. This is very easy to do with Emercury. After you have this relevant data, you can then use it with personalization tags in your broadcasts and auto-responders.
Email automation
When you use a quality email service, automation is quite simple. It can also get as complex as you want and need it to be.
At the most basic level, you’re talking about setting up an “autoresponder email sequence”. This is where you define a sequence of emails to be sent to the reader after joining. Right after joining they might get a “welcome email” because that’s how you set up the autoresponder. Then you might set it up to send them “Newsletter 1” about 3 days after joining. Then send them “Newsletter 2” a week after that, etc.
This is email automation at its most basic level, and for many years this is all that email automation entailed. These days however automation has become a lot more interesting. Now with a provider like Emercury, everyone has access to more advanced automation features. You no longer have to run a Fortune 500 to tap into the power of advanced automation.
When going into more advanced forms of automation, you’re typically working with “rules of automation” or “triggers”. Basically “if x happens, send y email”
The most basic trigger is “if added to email list”. And it is most often followed up with “then send this email sequence”. This is the traditional email automation strategy. It is what I described as being the “basic email sequence autoresponder” above.
This type of trigger is great as your default starting point. However, when you wanna get fancier, this trigger is no longer good enough. Let’s say that you want to send different kinds of emails to different kinds of people. If all you have is the “on joining list” trigger, you have to get different people onto different lists manually.
Let’s say that you run a newsletter for pet-lovers. Are you sending lots of emails and finding out that some of them are more interested in dog-specific emails? If all you have is the default trigger, you have to move them to a new list manually. Alternatively, you can send an email and ask people to resubscribe to a new “dog-lovers” list to get the more dog-centric emails.
As you might see, neither is an elegant solution. Fortunately, with an intelligent service like Emercury, this can be done in a much better way. You can set up an intelligent autoresponder that acts on other, more advanced triggers. Let’s say that someone signs up to your main “pet lovers” list. But then they keep clicking on dog-related links. You can set up a “dog lover” autoresponder that intelligently notices this and sends them more dog-related emails. For more information, check out our training video on autoresponders.
The Bold approach
Making sure that the emails are sufficiently personalized and segmented is just the start. That only ensures that you’re sending the best-matched content to the most appropriate subscribers. Just because you’ve sent them the content that is best matched, doesn’t guarantee they’ll open it.
You need to grab the attention of a distracted email recipient. They are probably looking at an inbox full of new messages. Unless yours stands out in some way, it will get ignored or postponed indefinitely.
You want to spend some time subscribing to popular newsletters and noticing which subjects “grab you” and make you open an email. In addition to this, you want to really get acquainted with our email a/b split testing feature. In conjunction with our reporting feature, this will allow you to track and understand which kinds of emails do better.
Present a new feature or product
It is really important to send your subscribers updates about each new feature or product that you develop. In an update email like this, you describe why you’re so excited about the new feature or product. Then you go into how it benefits them and then link them to a sales page or a feature page. This way you encourage the customers to try out your product or features immediately, while they’re still curious and excited. And if you do your job well in the email copy, they should be excited.
You want to do a little bit of experimentation and find out what works best. You may do so using our email A/B split-test feature, or just look into the email campaign reports. If you understand what kind of update emails create the best engagement, you will have a much easier time.
Mobile optimization
Mobile optimization is really important because nowadays so much happens on mobile phones. Most of us actually check email on our smartphones. That’s why you can’t underestimate mobile optimization. Your email conversions can be increased up to 53% if your emails are mobile-friendly.
Imagine this situation: you send an interesting email that really keeps the attention of the subscriber and they try to open it on their phone, but the text is too small to read or the graphics are jumbled. They give up on reading it and say “I’ll check it out from the PC later”. But they never check it again and move onto other things in their life.
If you’re an Emercury user, this is easy to solve. You can just pick one of our many mobile-optimized e-mail templates. With our intuitive drag and drop editor, you can then edit the template to meet your specific needs or branding.
Utilizing mobile to the fullest isn’t just about having a mobile-optimized design
While having mobile-optimized emails is a must, this is just the start of utilizing the power of mobile. When you join Emercury you also get access to features you won’t easily find elsewhere. In fact, we’re probably the only service that includes such powerful mobile tools in a free autoresponder. This includes mobile reporting, mobile URL redirection, mobile segmenting, and mobile campaigns.
Urgency emails
Urgency emails are reminder emails that are sent out around the holidays. You can present your promotions, delivery deadlines or dwindling stock in such emails. This can also include things like launches or anniversaries. For example, you can have a limited 48-hour sale because you’re celebrating the launch of a new product or a feature. Urgency always attracts the customer’s attention. That’s why this type of email will drive sales and earn you more money.
Cancellation emails
When a certain member cancels your subscription or your service don’t think that you’ve lost them forever. You might make a big mistake if you let them go without a goodbye.
You can manually send them a timely email with an apology for whatever you did wrong to make them cancel. Be careful, because you wouldn’t want to sound too pushy. However, you’ll have a big chance of getting them back as your subscribers. At the very least you’ll get a good insight as to why some people might cancel.
Here’s the bottom line: Supercharging email engagement takes a lot of work and time. But once you invest that time and money, you’ll get great results and earn a lot of money. You just need to find the best methods that work for you. What’s the right way to accomplish this? By testing many different of supercharging email engagement.
About Author
Tags: email automation, email enagement, email personalization