A high email engagement rate means your email marketing campaign is going fairly well. If it isn’t, there could be numerous things going wrong with your campaign. Probably you’re sending out bulk emails, or being too salse-y. These don’t count as email engagement best practices and you need to stop right away.
If your emails look like they’re just sent to sell, chances are they might not even get opened. Even if they do, people will ignore or throw them in the bin thinking it’s just another promotional email.
There’s a science behind writing and sending a highly impactful email. You need to know what should and shouldn’t be included, your target audience, and what would catch your audience’s attention the minute they see the subject.
Email Engagement Definition
What is email engagement? It is an estimate of how your subscribers interact with your email marketing campaign. When you send emails, some of your subscribers open it, some ignore it, others click on the CTA button or links, and some might even unsubscribe–these are all reactions, therefore, engagement. They’re not always positive.
You should track these email engagement metrics to know whether your campaign is successful or not.
Mistakes You May Be Committing That Result in Low Email Engagement
People commit numerous mistakes while sending emails from writing too salse-y and long emails, to dispatching too many or too less. Here are a few things you should avoid to increase email engagement.
1. Keeping Contacts Unengaged
If you’ve just started with email marketing, and only a few people subscribed to your newsletters, don’t wait for the list to grow before sending out any emails. This will keep your current contacts unengaged and eventually, they will forget about you.
Instead, keep sending out your well-crafted and engaging newsletters and work on growing your contacts at the same time.
2. Sounding Like a Salesperson
Here’s the thing–people want to buy but do not want to be sold to. Even though email marketing is a way of increasing sales, you shouldn’t sound like you’re here to sell. That annoys people and they end up ignoring the newsletters.
Instead, write an email that sounds friendly and personal. Write as if you would speak to them in person. You wouldn’t start a conversation with someone like, “Dear Adam … “ would you? Try, “Hey, I’m Dave,” or something you would say to a person standing in front of you.
3. Asking Subscribers to Do Everything at Once
One of the most common mistakes that result in low email engagements, is asking your readers to do everything at once. Don’t ask them to subscribe to your channel, follow your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., all at once.
One email must contain only one call to action.
4. Using Clickbait Subject Lines
There’s a difference between a catchy and misleading subject line. Writing a misleading subject line won’t do you any good. On the contrary, it can result in loss. Subscribers tend to report spam or unsubscribe to emails like that.
Instead, try to write an attention-grabbing subject line, but avoid using vocabulary that would mislead the readers.
Tips to Increase Email Engagement
When you work hard to craft an email and get an open rate of below 10%, it can be demotivating. There are a lot of things to an email besides writing. If your emails are well-written and still don’t attract a lot of people, here are some ways to increase email engagement:
1. Get a Custom Email
An email sent from a free account like “name@gmail.com” is more likely to be ignored as people think of it as spam or promotional email. Custom email addresses look highly relevant and authentic. , Emails sent from yourname@yourbusiness.com have a better chance of being opened.
You can get a matching email with your domain, such as yourname@yourband.com. It will help people recognize your brand.
2. Improve Your Subject Lines
According to the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Neil Patel, one of the highly effective email engagement tips is to write your subject lines in lowercase. This makes your emails look casual and unprofessional, increasing the chances of them being opened.
Another tip is to write a casual subject line as you would write to a friend. If you sound too professional, it will result in low email engagement. Most people don’t bother to open a business email.
Here are three ideas about using human tendencies to write a compelling subject line.
- Write something humorous.
- Fear of missing out. For example, you can write, “(number of products) products left.” It would make people want to buy your products before you run out. Don’t lie, though.
- Write something that will make people curious about what’s inside.
3. Send a Welcome Email Immediately
As soon as a visitor clicks the button to subscribe to your newsletter, send them a welcome email. That’s the best time when they’re most likely to engage with you. Don’t put in numerous calls to action, only getting them to reply with a hello would be great.
That little interaction is the first step to building a relationship with your subscribers.
4. Include Multiple Links
Including links to your article is another way to increase email engagement. The more links you add, the more likely people are to tap them resulting in higher click-through rates. That doesn’t mean that you start embedding 20 to 30 links in each newsletter. That’s how your emails might end up in junk or spam sections.
Keep it moderate with the number of links. Not too few and not too much. With the number of links, you should also be considerate of the anchor text. If your anchor text is the title of your website or business, the readers will most probably won't click it.
You can use phrases such as, “learn the strategies here” or “learn more about…” Readers are more likely to click the link if they think it will be helpful to them.
5. Conduct A/B Tests
An A/B test or split test is when you prepare two variations of one marketing campaign and send them out to a small percentage of the contacts in your list. For instance, you come up with two emails for one idea. You send option A to one group of audience and option B to another.
Decide whether you want more click-through rates, reply rates, or conversion rates. Then go with the one which performed better in terms of what you want.
6. Make Your Emails Mobile Responsive
Making your emails mobile responsive will drastically increase email engagement, as over 61.9% of internet users open emails on their mobile devices. Make sure that the mobile user experience is as good as it is on the desktop. Or even better.
7. Send Personalized Emails
Personalized emails count as one of the email engagement best practices. When you send the right content at the right time to the right people, you will see a drastic increase in engagement.
Custom-written emails also help in building a personal relationship with the reader. According to research, you can generate 5.7 times higher sales with personalized emails.
The Easiest Way to Send Emails
When you go for an email marketing service provider, you would expect to go through a series of steps and pa,y a couple of hundred dollars. Not anymore.
Say hello to Strikingly. It is a ridiculously easy-to-use website builder which is also an entire marketing suite in one platform.
Image taken from Strikingly user website
Strikingly allows its users to send emails to more than 2000 contacts per month. How do you send newsletters through Strikingly? Simply go to your dashboard, click on newsletters, then tap “send a newsletter.”
Image taken from Strikingly
You will be redirected to the editor where you can compose your email. You can add links, images, buttons, and text. You can send emails to manually imported contacts and the ones your Strikingly site collected (via sign-up from, checkout forms, contact forms, etc.).
Image taken from Strikingly
If you wish to send your emails to only a specific group of contacts, you can filter them according to the site and source.
Image taken from Strikinlgy
Furthermore, you can send a test email to yourself, save it as a draft to send later, or dispatch them right away.
How to Calculate Email Engagement Metrics
Here are some vital email engagement metrics and how to calculate them.
1. Click-through rate
This refers to the percentage of readers who clicked the links in your emails. You can calculate it by dividing the number of total clicks by the number of emails delivered. Then multiply the results by a hundred to get a percentage.
2. Conversion rate
This is the percentage of subscribers who clicked on the links in your email and completed the desired task, like, purchasing a product. To estimate the conversion rate, divide the number of people who completed the task by the number of delivered emails. Multiply the number you got by 100, and that’s it
3. Email Forwarding Rate
The email forwarding rate is the percentage of receivers who shared the email content to a social network or forwarded it to a friend by tapping on the “share” button.
You can calculate the email forwarding rate by dividing the number of clicks on the share button by the number of delivered emails. Then multiply by a hundred to get a percentage.
Conclusion
Email engagement is the interaction of your subscribers with your newsletters. It is crucial, as just delivering newsletters to your subscribers won’t do you any good. A few ways to increase email engagement are sending personalized emails, adding useful links, writing an attention-grabbing subject line, conducting A/B tests, and making your email mobile responsive.
Monitor the figures you get, and make changes according to the results so that the money and time you spend on email marketing doesn’t go in vain.
