10 ways to boost email engagement: Get your clients involved

Social sites tend to grab the headlines, so you might be surprised to know that email remains one of the most effective forms of marketing.

According to the Big Australia Report from Responsys, 84 per cent of digital marketers are concentrating on email. With such a strong focus on email, your clients are likely to be inundated with newsletters, product shoots and special offers – so what can you do to make your emails stand out?

1. Get your subject line right

The subject line is the first thing your email will be judged on, so get it right. Strive for clarity and focus on highlighting customer benefits. And the shorter, the better – the Adestra Subject Line Analysis Report found that subject lines with fewer than 10 characters had a 58 per cent open rate.

2. Add a personal touch

If you want your readers to really engage with your emails, give them a real person to engage with. Rather than sending everything from a generic, automated address, add a name and make sure there's a staff member on hand to deal with any replies.

3. Utilise that snippet

Most email clients show a small snippet of the message's main content in the inbox. Use the opening lines of your message to communicate a strong enticement for clicking through and reading the whole email.

4. Include social-sharing options

If you’re sharing something interesting in your emails, don’t you think there's a chance your readers might want to share it too? Include social buttons to let your readers do just that and allow them to connect with you on a more personal level.

5. Make sure your recipients have opted in

The best way to promote engagement with your readers is to make sure they are actually interested in receiving your emails. Add subscribers to your list on an opt-in basis and make it easy for them to opt out. That way, you're more likely to keep them as a customer, if not a subscriber.

6. Target your readers

It's also a great idea to use an automated customer relationship management (CRM) system to target and segment your audience so that frequent buyers and first-time customers receive the right email at the right time.

7. Consider your mobile audience

The growth of smartphones means that failing to optimise your email for the mobile audience could be a fatal mistake – Litmus found that 47 per cent of emails are now opened on mobile clients.

8. Minimise the need for scroll

Your time-poor readers don't want to have to read your entire email just to work out what you want from them – especially when they're on a smartphone. Get your call to action in early and save them from having to scroll.

9. Pay attention to your users

Make full use of your email analytics services to ensure that when something works – or doesn't work – in your email campaign, you know all about it and how to craft better emails moving forward.

10. Get off to a good start

When you're inviting people to sign up for your emails, always ask for a first name and any relevant details they're happy to share so you can personalise your emails from the get-go. You should also make it crystal clear what kind of service they're going to be getting so they know what to expect.

Too much to take in? Get some help for your email marketing campaign with your Bloomtools consultant.