It can be quite easy to forget that marketing is all about the people we want to draw in. Everyone has goals, but unless you focus on how you communicate to your audience, you won’t be achieving your objectives any time soon.
This is because putting your prospects and customers at the forefront is vital for marketing success. Constantly providing your subscribers with great experiences will build up your reputation and increase their trust in your company’s business model.
No matter if you’re a small business or a large enterprise, providing your followers with personalized experiences will benefit you immensely. When people know that you only send high-quality, relevant content to them, then they will start anticipating your next update and engaging with your brand regularly.
Keeping your recipients interested in your brand is essential if you want your email marketing campaigns to succeed. After all, highly engaged users have the best chance of converting and performing desired actions.
What Is User Engagement in Email Marketing?
User engagement in email marketing is a measurement of how your contacts interact with the messages you send them. It takes into account metrics that assess how often people open, click, and follow through with your desired actions.
Staying updated with your email campaign’s statistics and learning how to measure user engagement can let you make changes to improve how you design your emails and their content. The goal here is to make your campaigns even more effective than its previous iteration.
Marketers should constantly monitor customer engagement they get from their emails because it allows them to reveal prospective issues and identify solutions to resolve them immediately. Neglecting email engagement concerns could easily lead to major problems that can make it difficult for senders to recover from.
Every email marketer wants their campaigns to get recipients to open their messages and complete the actions they want. But before you can calculate user engagement and assess your campaigns, you first need to know what metrics to look out for.
User Engagement Metrics to Consider
You can better understand how engaged your contacts are by taking a look at the user engagement metrics of your campaigns. These statistics will help you assess your overall user engagement.
We’ve divided these metrics into positive and negative categories to make them easier for you to comprehend.
Positive Metric #1: Opens
The open rate is one of the most common metrics to consider in any email marketing campaign as it indicates how many unique individuals opened your messages. It’s not the same as the unique open rate as they’re two different terms.
Your email’s open rate is the total times contacts opened your messages. It also keeps track of how many times subscribers have opened them. Meanwhile, the unique email open rate is the total number of times your message was opened initially. Opening a message repeatedly won’t be recorded under this metric.
Both of these metrics serve their purpose of letting marketers see a fraction of how effective their email marketing efforts are in terms of engaging users. However, it shouldn’t be the sole basis to define success, but instead, should be used together with other metrics to assess the campaign’s performance overall.
Positive Metric #2: Clicks
Your click-through rate is an analysis of how many unique individuals clicked links in your messages.
Given that the majority of marketing emails are made to promote action or drive people towards a specific online content, click-through rates offer a decent parameter to assess how often your target audience goes through with your desired action.
The key here is to identify which links are generating the highest clicks, which wordings are the most enticing, and which areas of your email are more effective than others.
Source: HubSpot
Positive Metric #3: Conversions
Conversions are one of the most accurate measures of effectiveness. Your conversion rate shows you just how many people went ahead and were driven to complete stakeholder actions.
These actions could be anything from signing up to a landing page to downloading an online resource to taking part in a webinar. It could even be used to get people to show up in specific in-person events so long as the statistics can be tied to the digital realm.
Positive Metric #4: This Is Not Spam (TINS)
The “This Is Not Spam” button, or more simply TINS, is an indication that a contact wants to receive your emails by informing their email service provider that they should let your messages through. Many marketers might be surprised at how effectively getting people to push through with TINS can affect their email campaigns.
In case you notice a drop in your sender reputation and a significant portion of your messages are going to the junk or spam folder, then you might improve your deliverability by asking recipients to mark your messages by clicking the TINS button.
A couple of ways you can do this is to ask them directly through email or phone and by sending an attractive email asking them to mark your messages as important.
Negative Metric #1: Spam Complaints
Your spam complaint rate, or spam rate, is the total number of contacts who reported your email as spam. An acceptable standard for spam complaint rates is anything less than 0.1%, though 0-0.3% is a favorable range.
Going above this is too high and can harm your sender reputation and email deliverability in the long run.
The two most common ways people report messages as spam are by:
- Clicking on the “Report Spam” button in their inboxes
- Clicking the unsubscribe link and then indicating their reason for doing so as “Spam”
Negative Metric #2: Unsubscribes
The unsubscribe rate of your email campaigns is an indication of the number of users who have decided to no longer take part in receiving your messages. Your unsubscribe rate is extremely significant in revealing user engagement and it directly affects your reputation as a sender.
Given that satisfying everyone simply isn’t realistic, having an unsubscribe rate of 0.05% is considered ideal. This means that if you have a thousand subscribers, only five of them decide to unsubscribe.
In case you notice that the rate of unsubscribes in your campaigns is starting to increase and exceed past 0.05%, then this means there’s a problem with your emails. Some of the most common reasons include sending irrelevant data, formatting content poorly, and overwhelming contacts with how frequently you send emails.
Negative Metric #3: Relapses
Your relapse rate is one of the more advanced email metrics that marketers are now considering these days. It tells you how many of your recipients started to re-engage with your messages but have once again become inactive.
Such measurement can provide you with great insights into how effective your email marketing strategy and messaging have been, particularly your re-engagement campaigns.
Upon analyzing this metric, you can then choose to segment users based on how many of them are active once again from those who returned to being inactive. Doing so should help you determine whether or not you should change your approach so you can effectively win inactive subscribers back.
Negative Metric #4: Engaged Losses
The engaged loss rate of your campaign measure engagement of active and engaged users who have been lost at a certain period in your mailing list. Besides analyzing the unsubscribe rate, marketers should also assess the time on the list to the engaged user loss rate relationship. This will let them understand the changes that might have caused old contacts to unsubscribe.
Losing subscribers who have previously engaged with your email campaign is a significant blow to your campaign as this leads to missed opportunities. That’s why it’s important to know why these long-time subscribers chose to leave as it can provide you with in-depth insights on possible mistakes you’ve been making.
Tips on How to Engage With Your Email Subscribers
Designing your emails to make them interesting and relevant to keep recipients engaged is no easy feat. That’s why we’ve prepared several tips that will help you engage email users effectively.
Consider the following changes to your email campaign below:
Tip #1: Use Compelling and Straightforward Subject Lines
The subject lines of your messages play a direct role in whether or not contacts will open them. In fact, there’s a higher chance a recipient will open them based on how you approach your subject lines.
That’s why you should ensure that your subject line doesn’t only provide a summary of your email’s content but should also be compelling to readers. Combining subject lines with preheader texts can help you reflect vital information provided in your emails.
Customizing subject lines are quite effective nowadays. Many marketers have seen a significant increase in their email open rates thanks to personalizing their subject lines by combining them with preheader texts.
Furthermore, many email marketing platforms let you make your subject lines more personalized. Adding the recipient’s first name in the subject line can be quite eye-catching once they receive your message.
Tip #2: Create a Winning Email Campaign Formula
Having an excellent email marketing formula is essential if you want to experience success with your campaigns down the line. But to be effective, each line that you input in your emails must be persuasive enough to cause contacts to read the next all the way to the end.
After crafting the right formula, you should save this email template and begin reusing it for future messages. You want your email content to have a compelling opening, social proof, and a powerful call-to-action (CTA).
At the start, you want to present your big idea to your readers and then provide them with a series of benefits, reasons, facts, and sources to solidify your message. In the end, you should use a strong CTA that will drive people to perform your desired action.
An important element in a winning email marketing formula is the social proof that you present to readers. This will add to the credibility of what you’re trying to argue and provide you with a higher probability of convincing subscribers to follow through.
Tip #3: Teach Your Subscribers Something Relevant
There are several reasons why people would decide to sign up for your email list. It could be because of a free gift or download, access to gated content, entry to a contest, or a discount on their next purchase.
If you want people to maintain a positive user engagement rate, then you need to think past the initial product or service you offered and plan on giving them things that they value. This doesn’t have to be always something tangible such as a gift or a promo code – valuable information can be just as effective.
Educating recipients, particularly when it concerns themselves, can make them interested to the point that they’ll start anticipating your next email. One way you can go about this is by sharing with subscribers the patterns of their past purchases or their spending habits.
Providing contacts with frequent summaries such as these examples can be a great way to have something to look forward to from your brand. Getting people hooked on seeing their statistics on the same day each week will increase engagement and the probability of them interacting more with your emails.
Tip #4: Incorporate Personalization in Your Emails
Every email recipient wants to feel that they’re more than just an email address that is part of a huge subscriber database. They also want to feel that your brand can connect to them including what it has to offer. One of the best ways you can make this work is by personalizing your messages as much as you can.
A good technique to incorporate for personalization is to combine your knowledge of a customer to where they are in their buying journey. You can use this data to provide them with personalized messages that will nurture and increase user engagement.
Besides wanting to get emails that matter to them, recipients also want to get messages that fit in with their wants and needs. Once you know what these are, you can create emails that directly address their pain points, ensuring that your subscribers have emails that are worth reading.
Connecting with audiences on a personal level is perhaps the best way to improve user engagement. That’s why when creating your content, you want each message to be tailor-made to each recipient. This could mean segmenting your database into smaller groups and then optimizing your content for engagement.
Tip #5: Add Stories to Your Email Content
Besides ensuring that your messages are personalized to recipients, you also want to start incorporating storytelling to your subscribers. This is because telling a story creates suspense and can get people hooked on what you’re about to share.
Most readers want to read a good story especially since it keeps them intrigued as to what would happen next. This same approach is something you can add to your email marketing campaigns.
For one, you can talk about the most common issue your audience is currently experiencing. When your problem can immediately resonate with your subscribers, they will want to open your email and read about it. This is simply because they are interested in learning about the solution that can help resolve their concern.
You can improve your storytelling skills thereby increasing user engagement by:
- Combining eye-catching facts with narratives
- Illustrating the primary points of your argument
- Leveraging quality imagery to tell your story
- Making the story relevant to your subscribers
- Using metaphors
- Making connections with your readers
Tip #6: Give Subscribers a Unique Email Experience
Your contacts receive a significant amount of emails daily and weekly that can make yours get lost easily in the mix. To ensure that your messages stay relevant to your subscribers, you want to give them a unique experience that they’ll remember.
There are several ways you can go through with this approach but one of the most effective today is by using video content.
With videos accounting for a significant portion of worldwide internet traffic, it only makes sense to start incorporating them in your emails. This is especially true with many monthly active users preferring this type of medium in consuming content.
By providing videos in your email, you can create the human connection that people desire and increase their probability of engaging with your content in the future.
Conclusion
Email engagement is an important aspect that product and marketing teams need to consider in their campaigns. This is because keeping users engaged with your messages is key to ensuring the success of your efforts.
But when you neglect your user engagement, this can easily lead to a damaged sender reputation and email deliverability. To ensure you can avoid all of these, you want to frequently assess these metrics:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
- Spam complaint rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Relapse rate
- Engaged loss rate
Furthermore, the tips provided in this guide are designed to help you ensure your email engagement stays high. Following these pointers can help keep subscribers engaged and interested while they eagerly await the next email in your campaign.