One of the biggest areas where email marketing can make a difference--but where it is often underutilized--is in nurturing engagement. Whether your efforts are focused on B2B or B2C marketing, using email marketing for engagement can reap big rewards, and it’s something that your brand should implement, and can implement without having to spend a huge amount of time and effort. Of course, it’s important to go about engagement campaigns the right way, so knowing a few things before you start will ensure success.
The easiest way to boost engagement in your email campaigns is also one of the scariest: ask for feedback. You can do this through a survey (with, of course, the offer of some exclusive goody for those who are willing to take the time), or through even just a direct question in the email you’re sending out already, inviting replies. If you don’t know why people aren’t responding to your emails the way you want them to, you can’t fix it. Of course, you can’t get everyone back that way; sometimes people just flat-out lose interest. But identifying points in the sales funnel or in the engagement track where subscribers are falling off more often provides you with the information you need to keep that from happening as frequently.
The second part of this is, of course, to create campaigns with engagement in mind from beginning to end. Drip campaigns, for example, foster engagement by providing information without sales verbiage or attempts to gain a direct conversion, which in turns increases trust and loyalty to your brand. Trigger emails--welcomes, anniversary emails, event emails, abandoned cart emails, and so on--are another way to use email to engage with subscribers. People like to feel recognized, and they like to feel as though a brand views them as a person--not a number. So emails that react to things that they have done in a personal and personable way will encourage the feeling that they are valued, that they are an individual. It’s basic psychology.
Another major aspect of engagement email marketing efforts is an offshoot of the second point: humanize yourself. According to Site Impact, make the formatting of your emails human-friendly, and make your sender address something that comes across as personal, rather than impartial. While it can be alluring to go for brilliant creative design and pithy, witty content, don’t underestimate the possibilities of an email that comes across as personal and one-to-one, without a dozen bells and whistles. Sending occasional emails that come across to the subscriber as being directly from you to them--emails that are simply text--is a measure that can really boost engagement. Of course, if that email is coming from an anonymous email address, it comes across more as spam; so an important tool to have in your kit is a sender address that represents--in the mind of your recipients--an actual person. The no-reply email address already creates problems with email deliverability as providers have started to disfavor it in reaction to bad actors; but while a “marketing@” or “newsletters@” type of email address works for general missives and messages, if you’re going for a personalized approach the sender address should absolutely be something personal, with a name to attach to it.
With these guidelines in mind, your brand can plunge into the world of engagement email marketing. Knowing how to approach this particular type of campaign is important for making sure that you don’t make big mistakes, but at the end of the day, the foundations of this subset of email are: make it personal, seek feedback, and emphasize connection rather than conversions. Using these premises as your guide, you can reach out to customers in a big way, and reap the benefits of loyalty from an increasingly engagement-driven consumer base.
Call Site Impact today to work with our industry leading marketing experts to launch your next email marketing and digital advertising campaign! (954-982-7900, info@siteimpact.com)
One of the biggest areas where email marketing can make a difference--but where it is often underutilized--is in nurturing engagement. Whether your efforts are focused on B2B or B2C marketing, using email marketing for engagement can reap big rewards, and it’s something that your brand should implement, and can implement without having to spend a huge amount of time and effort. Of course, it’s important to go about engagement campaigns the right way, so knowing a few things before you start will ensure success.
The easiest way to boost engagement in your email campaigns is also one of the scariest: ask for feedback. You can do this through a survey (with, of course, the offer of some exclusive goody for those who are willing to take the time), or through even just a direct question in the email you’re sending out already, inviting replies. If you don’t know why people aren’t responding to your emails the way you want them to, you can’t fix it. Of course, you can’t get everyone back that way; sometimes people just flat-out lose interest. But identifying points in the sales funnel or in the engagement track where subscribers are falling off more often provides you with the information you need to keep that from happening as frequently.
The second part of this is, of course, to create campaigns with engagement in mind from beginning to end. Drip campaigns, for example, foster engagement by providing information without sales verbiage or attempts to gain a direct conversion, which in turns increases trust and loyalty to your brand. Trigger emails--welcomes, anniversary emails, event emails, abandoned cart emails, and so on--are another way to use email to engage with subscribers. People like to feel recognized, and they like to feel as though a brand views them as a person--not a number. So emails that react to things that they have done in a personal and personable way will encourage the feeling that they are valued, that they are an individual. It’s basic psychology.
Another major aspect of engagement email marketing efforts is an offshoot of the second point: humanize yourself. According to Site Impact, make the formatting of your emails human-friendly, and make your sender address something that comes across as personal, rather than impartial. While it can be alluring to go for brilliant creative design and pithy, witty content, don’t underestimate the possibilities of an email that comes across as personal and one-to-one, without a dozen bells and whistles. Sending occasional emails that come across to the subscriber as being directly from you to them--emails that are simply text--is a measure that can really boost engagement. Of course, if that email is coming from an anonymous email address, it comes across more as spam; so an important tool to have in your kit is a sender address that represents--in the mind of your recipients--an actual person. The no-reply email address already creates problems with email deliverability as providers have started to disfavor it in reaction to bad actors; but while a “marketing@” or “newsletters@” type of email address works for general missives and messages, if you’re going for a personalized approach the sender address should absolutely be something personal, with a name to attach to it.
With these guidelines in mind, your brand can plunge into the world of engagement email marketing. Knowing how to approach this particular type of campaign is important for making sure that you don’t make big mistakes, but at the end of the day, the foundations of this subset of email are: make it personal, seek feedback, and emphasize connection rather than conversions. Using these premises as your guide, you can reach out to customers in a big way, and reap the benefits of loyalty from an increasingly engagement-driven consumer base.
Call Site Impact today to work with our industry leading marketing experts to launch your next email marketing and digital advertising campaign! (954-982-7900, info@siteimpact.com)