- Make Emails Relevant To Audience — If your emails aren’t relevant to your target market, to your subscribers, than your email engagement metrics will suffer, plain and simple. People only want things in their inbox which have their best interest in mind and enough emails from someone who only wants you to buy, convert, or get on a call can get frustrating. Provide value and do so consistently before you ever ask for a commitment. Michael Hyatt goes so far as to say that you should provide 20 pieces of value before asking for something in return from your audience.
- Be Consistent — Sending emails inconsistently, one email this week, 10 emails next week, and then one email next month, is a sure-fire way to lose subscribers. People want to know how much you’re going to email them (within reason) and they want you to stick to what you said. Consistency is the bedrock for any healthy relationship, and that applies equally to your email marketing habits.
- Use Personalization When Appropriate — Typically, it’s best to choose whether you’re going to use personalized emails to connect with your audience or you’re going to speak from a pedestal to your audience and own it. Both are fine. Both work. But you want to be consistent about how you communicate with your audience so that a sporadic personal or impersonal email doesn’t feel insincere. Inconsistent personalization can hurt, rather than help, your relationship with your audience. Choose one method and stick to it.
- Use a Subscription Management Center — Instead of sending everything to everyone, a subscription management center allows your subscribers to tell you what kind of content they want to receive and even when they want to receive it. There’s probably no better way to increase email engagement than by asking your audience what they want and then giving that to them. With a subscription management center, you can do just that.
- Consider a Different Sending Frequency — Sending too many emails to your audience or too few emails often has the same result: lower open and click-through rates and more unsubscribes with each email. If your list isn’t engaging with your emails like you want them to, consider sending less often or more often depending on what you think they might want: or take out the guess-work and segment your audience based on how many emails they want to receive from you weekly (you can use a subscription management center to do this).
- Consider Sending At a Different Time Of Day — When is the best day or the best time of day to send an email? It’s a question that email marketers have tried to answer for quite some time. But the truth is, there’s not just one answer. Your audience will be different than another person’s audience and you must determine the best day and time to send for your subscribers. The best way to find out? Ask them when they want to receive your emails.
Note: Remember, the better the engagement you receive on your emails, the happier your audience will be. The happier your audience is, the better your email engagement will be. Your customer’s satisfaction and your email engagement metrics go hand-in-hand, meaning you should take email engagement just as seriously as your audience’s happiness and vice versa.