How to Increase Customer Engagement in Email Marketing

Email marketing remains the most popular and effective strategy for connecting with your customers online, boasting an average ROI of $36 for every dollar spent. But, to generate this type of success through email marketing, it’s important to make sure that you have a strong strategy for driving customer engagement throughout the process.

This requires doing more than sending standard batch-and-blast, generic messages, and, instead, developing content that engages with each customer on a personal level. Using a best-in-class marketing automation solution, like Iterable, you’ll be able to send real-time personalized content in direct response to your customers’ preferences and behaviors through email marketing and other channels they use. This will increase engagement with your brand, leading to higher sales, more customer loyalty, and an increase in brand advocacy.

Here are some strategies for increasing customer engagement via email marketing.

Segment Your Audiences

Your customers are all different. Finding what makes each of them tick allows you to connect with them on a personal level. By using a marketing solution that integrates data from all of your marketing and sales technology services, you can get a 360-degree picture of each customer. You should be able to use data from your CRM, web and app analytics tools, e-commerce platform, social media tools, and other marketing tools to get a comprehensive picture of each customer’s journey.

This data enables you to segment your audience into groups based on factors such as location, brand preferences, new versus returning customers, and others for broad marketing campaigns. Beyond that, you can drill down to the individual level with dynamically generated content that spotlights content for which your customer has previously demonstrated interest. When you combine this capability with Catalog features, for instance, and a customer browses a webpage for a graphic tee shirt, you can send them an email spotlighting that tee shirt as well as others by the same designer.

You can also use segmentation to develop different workflows based on each customer’s stage in the sales cycle. Customers who’ve recently joined your email list will receive a promotional offer for 30% off anything in your store, for example. Customers who haven’t bought anything in more than a month might receive more customized offers based on their purchase history, such as a discount code for a brand of shoes they’ve previously purchased, giving them more motivation to re-engage with your brand.

Use Real-Time Behavioral Triggers to Send Your Messages

By sending your emails at the point in time when your customers are actively interested, you’ll receive much higher customer engagement rates.

Using a marketing automation platform, like Iterable, you can send email marketing campaigns in response to your customers’ interactions with your brand. For instance, if a customer clicks on an ad and views a product page, you can follow up with an email focused on that product and other recommendations they might enjoy. Or, if a customer places an item in their shopping cart, you can follow up with a message encouraging them to complete the purchase.

By sending messages during times when your customers are already engaged, you’ll be able to solicit higher open and clickthrough rates, and, ultimately, generate more sales.

Use Eye-Catching Design

Your email design should be optimized to capture your audience’s attention, no matter where they’re viewing your message. Make sure that all of your email templates are mobile-responsive and will automatically resize elements based on the browser your customer is using.

You should make sure to include important content “above the fold,” or at the top of your email template before a user needs to scroll down. Include eye-catching CTAs that encourage your customers to take action by clicking through to your website.

And of course, it’s important to get users to open your emails in the first place. Use short subject lines to ensure that customers see the entire headline—no matter what device they’re using (ideally, no more than 27 characters). Experiment with your subject lines to see what works best for your audience: you can personalize the content, use humor, or focus on urgency. Try out A/B testing to see what types of messages generate the highest open rates, and build on those.

Incorporate Other Marketing Channels

One of the best strategies for increasing customer engagement via email marketing is to integrate other marketing channels your customers use, including SMS marketing, in-app notifications, social media, and even direct mail. Using a cross-channel marketing platform like Iterable, you can set up sequenced cross-channel marketing campaigns that incorporate email alongside other channels, with the next message in the sequence determined based on the customer’s response or lack thereof.

For example, the sequence might start with an email, then, if the customer doesn’t open the email, follow up with an SMS message with the same promotion, increasing the likelihood that they’ll engage with your brand through another channel.

By incorporating other marketing channels, you’ll be able to recapture your customers’ attention, helping draw their attention back to your email marketing messages so that you can continue to leverage that channel.

How to Measure Customer Engagement in Email Marketing

Once you’ve segmented, created real-time messages, perfected the design, and incorporated other channels, what metrics should you use to determine the success of your email marketing engagement efforts? Here are a few KPIs to focus on during your campaigns:

• Subscription rate - How many subscribers join within a certain time?
• Unsubscribe rate - How many subscribers unsubscribe during the same time?
• Deliverability - How many messages can’t be delivered?
• Open rate - How many times was your email opened? It’s worth measuring “unique open rate” alongside open rates, as some subscribers may open a message multiple times.
• Clickthrough rate - How many subscribers clicked on the CTA in your email?
• Spam rate - How many subscribers marked your message as spam?
• Conversion rate - How many subscribers completed a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or downloading your app?

Track your metrics for each campaign, and look for opportunities to optimize both your messaging and your sequencing through A/B testing to continue improving your email engagement metrics. Weave your email marketing metrics into your other channel metrics so that you can evaluate the success of your cross-channel marketing campaign as a whole and evaluate which channels are the most successful.

Using Iterable to Increase Customer Engagement

To maximize your customer engagement across email and the other marketing channels, it’s important to use a cross-channel marketing solution like Iterable. Iterable can centralize all of your marketing data from different sources, ensuring that you can create comprehensive customer profiles for personalized segmentation. It also enables you to automatically optimize your content and sequencing on a per-user basis, helping you to send offers and messages that your customers are likely to respond to. And, with seamless A/B testing, you can continually optimize your campaigns and workflows to achieve the best possible results.

By improving your customer engagement rates, you’ll be able to generate more revenue and long-term customer loyalty.