Everything About Email Marketing Engagement
Put simply, email marketing engagement is a measure of how your subscribed contacts interact with your email campaigns. This takes into account their click activity, compares it to how long they’ve been in your audience, meaning you can therefore classify them on an engagement scale.
But don’t worry if that seems daunting, we will walk you through everything you need to know about email marketing engagement and how to use that information to create targeted successful campaigns.
Why is Understanding Email Marketing Engagement Important?
Understanding how engaged consumers are with your email campaigns is important for several reasons such as knowing what marketing techniques are proving to be beneficial, and which are not having the desired effect. Both of these are vital in planning for future campaigns and ensuring they are successful.
However, you can also use email marketing engagement to segment and target contacts in the following ways:
- Reward Engaged Contacts
Create a segment of your contacts who often engage and offer a reward such as an exclusive discount or promotion to say thank you.
- Re-engage Contacts
Create a segment to target contacts who rarely engage with your content and offer them an incentive to re-engage, such as a special offer or giveaway. If these contacts still aren’t engaging with your emails after this, then you can consider targeting them with an ad instead.
- Combine Segmentation Criteria
You can create a more complex segment to target contacts based on engagement and another factor. For example, you might want to target people who often engage and interact with your email campaigns but never buy anything. To do this, you can segment based on email marketing engagement and e-commerce purchase data.
Email Engagement Metrics
Email engagement metrics are simply pieces of data that tell you who your active contacts are, what emails they enjoy, which links they click on, and so much more. Each piece of data tells you specific bits of information.
The following metrics are those that will help you measure your contacts’ engagement:
- Open Rate
This refers to how often your emails are being opened. However, it is crucial to consider the average open rate, which will vary depending on your industry.
- Click-through Rate
This shows the number of clicks on the links in your email from the total number of delivered emails, and like the open rate, this also varies depending on the industry.
- Click Map
This feature helps you monitor the number of clicks on each specific link in your email. It allows you to clearly understand which parts of the content in your email are most engaging for your audience.
- Unsubscribe Rate
This metric indicates the number of unsubscribed users from the total number of delivered emails. The unsubscribe rate is crucial to show email engagement.
Breaking Down the Levels of Engagement
Subscribed contacts can fall into 1 of 4 email marketing engagement levels at any given time: new, rarely, sometimes, or often. To determine a contact’s level of engagement, you can compare their activity score to how long they’ve been subscribed. This can be broken down in the following ways:
- Activity
Each contacts’ campaign activity, precisely clicks, is measured against your sending frequency.
- Time Subscribed
A simple measure that looks at when someone subscribed to receive marketing content from you.
Engagement level categories are simply a tool for you to use, and how you value each category will depend on what’s typical for you and your business. For example, if your business is seasonal, lower overall engagement with your email marketing may be average for you.
How to Make More Engaging Emails
- Create Eye-Catching Subject Lines
Your subject line determines whether subscribers will open your email. 47% of recipients decide to open your email based on the subject line. At the same time, 69% mark emails as spam only because they don’t like the subject line.
Make your subject line a summary of the email’s content. It should also be short enough to look good on mobile devices since 61% of users read emails from smartphones.
- Use Personalization
You can go beyond subject line personalisation and send emails with dynamic content, which means that some parts of your message change depending on the recipient’s location, gender, preferences, place in the sales funnel, etc., to fit every contact better.
- Share Relevant and Exciting Content
Make sure you’re sharing relevant, exclusive content that your contacts can’t find anywhere else.
Now you’ve had the importance of email marketing engagement broken down, you can implement it in regard to your own email campaigns! Better email engagement = better business engagement!
About the Author
Tamara Kettles is a recent English graduate and blogger. She loves all things writing and always has her head stuck in a book.
