Effective email marketing in today’s age is difficult. What is the best way for marketers to engage with consumers and businesses to ensure the message effectively reaches the inbox? And what does ‘engagement’ really mean anyway?
I’ve created five tips below to better help marketers effectively engage with their customers and win more business:
Tip 1: Engage - don’t annoy!
While mass distribution works in some marketing strategies, it should never be used in email marketing. Not only will recipients of the email become annoyed rather quickly, odds are they’ll start ignoring the messages or, worse, block the sender completely. Identify who in your organisation is emailing your customers (ideally, this will only be one person) and put a limit as to how many messages that customer receives per month. For example, if someone is receiving a monthly newsletter, auto-emails from the marketing department, ad hoc communication from the customer team and emails announcing new products, it’s easy to understand how they could become frustrated and begin ignoring the excessive emails altogether. Pinpoint the most important messages you want that customer to receive in order to achieve maximum engagement. So how do you do that…?
Tip 2: Know thy customer!
Whether you are targeting an individual or a business, in order to effectively engage, the messages you send across should be personalised and hold importance to the recipient. For example, perhaps the customer has been using product X for over a year, so you know this product is important to include in email messaging. On the flip side, this knowledge also gives you the advantage to introduce product Y to the customer if it relates to product X. Visibility is crucial in understanding the wants and needs of your target audience.
Tip 3: Email interaction should be customer-centric, not marketer-centric.
In other words, if you can’t provide value to the email recipient, your attempt at effectively engaging with them will fail. Rather than sending a message announcing new products and services, create a more targeted approach to help the recipient understand how your services can add value to them or their organisation. Think about the messages you’re sending from the customer’s point of view rather than that of a marketer. What type of email would be most likely to grab YOUR attention? Odds are, it’s the same type that will grab your customer’s.
Tip 4: Understand the different levels of engagement.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, it is of utmost importance for businesses to consider responses from clients who aren’t just opening emails but who may be engaging in a different way. For example, did recipients report your email as spam? Did they ignore it? Did they actually read the content? Knowing the answers to these questions is the best way to measure customer engagement, as well as to understand whether your message effectively reached the recipient’s inbox – with an emphasis on ‘effectively’!
Tip 5: Get familiar with mailbox providers’ point of view.
It’s important to know the difference between how mailbox providers see valuable email strategies versus how email marketers do. Once you are able to see it from their perspective, you will have a more successful email campaign. For example, mailbox providers understand that reputation is key and that one of the best ways to reach the customer’s inbox is to be predictable and consistent – that doesn’t, however, mean you should send a vast amount of emails (see Tip 1). It’s also important to keep authentication tight so as not to allow phishers or spammers to use your brand, which will inevitably cause recipients to lose trust in you organisation.
Any email marketer knows that effectively reaching the customer’s inbox is vital to success and I hope the above tips have provided some insight into how this can be achieved. As the old saying goes, ‘knowledge is power,’ and in order to truly understand email engagement you must also have knowledge of the weapons in your arsenal that can be of use to you as an email marketer.
By Guy Hanson, Senior Director of Consulting, Professional Services at Return Path.
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