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Engagement is an elusive beast: every email marketing professional wants an engaged audience, but what priorities a given recipient will have at a given time is an impossible metric to discover. However, one benefit of working in the email industry for a long time is that you get to know the experts; Site Impact has collected some expert advice on how to keep engagement up, and today we’re going to share those insights with you.
One way that experts agree brands can encourage engagement with newsletters (and other email marketing campaign types as well) is to incorporate a personal touch. This doesn’t have to be along overbearing lines, but adding a little bit of personality, a little bit of knowledge about your recipients, can go a long way. From some industry experts:
“NO SELLING. We can promote an ebook or webinar, but not a product. When you keep your newsletter content valuable based on ‘will my reader want this?’ -- the audience chooses to stay engaged.”
- Autumn Sullivan, Content Strategist, Big Sea Design
“Send emails from a person, not a company. When deciding to open an email, customers check to see if they know the person sending the message. An email that appears to be coming from an actual individual is more personal and much more likely to get opened.”
- Chris Allen, Content Marketing & Digital Media Manager, PhoenixNAP Global IT Solutions
Adding a fun component to your campaigns is another way to increase engagement; everyone can become a bit jaded about sales-oriented messages, and one way to counter that malaise is to incorporate functions already available in email coding to make things more interesting. As some industry leaders point out:
“One highly effective email newsletter strategy we’ve used to keep our list (and our clients’ lists) engaged is gamification. A couple simple-yet-delightfully effective examples include ‘peel to see your discount’ features with animated effects and simple trivia multiple-choice questions.
- Devin Beverage, Founder & Growth Strategist, DevBev Co.
“Make it interactive -- feature a weekly quote that readers submit, and prompt them to share the quotes publicly, for example tweet them at your brand.”
- Chris Gillespie, CEO at Find a Way Media
You can really go far with some very basic ideas, when it comes to engaging your audience. Adding a personal touch, enhancing relationships outside of a sales context, and incorporating interactive features like in-email games or recipient-submitted material will boost the engagement you have with your audience, and make your campaigns even more successful. Contact Site Impact to hear from our own experts about how to vamp up your email campaigns.
