5 Tips to Engage Your Customers via Email
By: Thomas Griffin, customerthink.com
Did you know that a strategically planned email marketing campaign can yield an ROI of up to 4400%?
This makes email marketing one of the most effective marketing tactics to reach out and connect with your customers.
However, engaging the intended audience through your emails is not that easy, as companies often flood recipients’ mailboxes with excessive messages.
Therefore, it’s important that you come up with a well-thought-out email marketing strategy in order to ensure positive results.
Here are a few tips that may come in handy:
1. Use Attention-Grabbing Subject Lines
Did you know that the average open rate of an email marketing campaign is reported to be less than 2%?
The mailboxes of your recipients are already flooded with quite a lot of personal and promotional messages. So, it’s important that your emails stand out from the rest of the messages.
Your subject lines play a major role here, as they help you grab the attention of the intended audience and make your emails more appealing.
It’s reported that 47% of recipients open emails because of their subject lines. So, think of them as your first impression. A well-thought-out email subject line guarantees higher open rates and increases the likelihood of engagement.
So, when you are coming up with subject lines for your emails, it’s best to keep a few things in mind.
Keeping your subject lines short and to the point goes a long way. Furthermore, using numbers or statistics in your subject lines may help improve your open rates.
Your core focus should be to convey just enough information through your subject lines to leave your recipients wanting more.
It’s also worth mentioning that creating a sense of urgency and leveraging the fear of missing out may help.
And most importantly, humor is one of the best ways to grab the attention of the intended audience.
2. Consider Personalization
To ensure that your email marketing campaign is a success, it’s important that you know your audience and let customer insights dictate your campaign planning.
Don’t expect much engagement if you use a single generic copy for messages to be sent to all recipients in your email list. If your goal is to drive traction, you should go with a more tailored approach and consider sending targeted emails to your customers.
This increases the likelihood that you will engage your audience and drive the intended call to action.
Even the smallest of details matter and go a long way, such as addressing your customers by their names in the email’s subject. It’s reported that personalizing email subject lines can increase your open rate by 26%. But that’s just the beginning.
The entire body of your email should be personalized as per the information accessible to you about your customers to drive better engagement and stimulate the recipient’s actions.
3. Leverage Visual Content
Sharing visual content through your emails is one of the most efficient tactics for engaging your recipients.
A majority of your customers may not mind reading emails containing text-based content. However, text-heavy emails can be a huge turn-off for some of them.
So, it’s important that you don’t just rely on text-based copy and consider using visual content such as images, GIFs, or infographics to engage your customers.
Visual content generally performs better at conveying the message compared to text, as our brains process images faster than text-based information.
4. Optimize Your Emails for Mobile
A common mistake many email marketers make is assuming that their recipients will open their emails on their desktops. Hence, they don’t consider going for a mobile-friendly email template. This is a major error, as 41% of people view their emails on mobile devices.
When you reach out to your customers in hopes of engaging them, not just the content of your message but its presentation also matters.
And sending emails that are unoptimized for mobile devices can cause you to bleed email subscribers, let alone engage them.
Since most people use their smartphones to check and respond to their emails, it’s best that you come up with an eye-catching email design that is optimized for all screen sizes to ensure better readability.
5. Be Strategic With Your Call to Action
To engage your customers through action-oriented emails, it’s important that you consider using a clear call to action.
A call to action is the key element that helps you achieve the set goal for an email marketing campaign and facilitates high engagement. Therefore, it’s highly recommended to be extra careful when devising a call to action for your email.
Being straightforward with your call to action and using compelling words may help here. Furthermore, the placement of your CTA should be well thought out. Plus, you should avoid using multiple CTAs in your emails, as they may end up confusing your audience.
Remember, the goal here is to engage the recipients and drive a particular action. So, it’s best that you stick with a single call to action and make sure that it stands out from the rest of your email copy.
Final Words
There you have it. The five tips to engage your customers via email. If you’ve been struggling to improve your open rates and find it difficult to drive the intended action through your emails, the recommendations provided may come in handy.