According to research by Ascend2, 55% of the marketing influencers surveyed want to focus on improving their email marketing engagement.
They know, as you probably do, that increased email engagement starts at the top of the funnel. This, in turn, leads to the completion of other strategic goals, like increased sales revenue, improved lead quality, increased conversion rates, and more.
Start Your List Right
Sometimes, when you buy contacts from a third-party vendor, the leads are stone-cold. They’ve never heard of your brand, nor do you know if they will ever be interested in it.
That’s why, often, the best place to start is with pre-warmed leads in the form of engagement data. Instead of buying contacts from people who have never even heard your brand name, you are buying leads with brand awareness.
The easiest way to find engaged, highly-interested leads is to track the earliest signs of email engagement, like HIPB2B does with its engagement data.
Clicks and opens are the earliest signs that leads on your list are interested. In Ascend2 ‘s research, 43% of email marketers surveyed said that they use early pipeline metrics like clicks and opens to track email engagement performance.
Instead of starting from scratch, you know that these leads already engaged with your content. That means they will be more open to the tactics that Ascend2 highlights in their report.
According to this research, some types of emails are more effective than the rest. What are they? Check out the top five most effective types of emails.
1. Single-Topic Email Campaigns
The most effective is single-topic email campaigns. As many as 46%, almost half of influencers, said this type of campaign is the most effective.
Why?
Single-topic campaigns keep leads engaged with one subject area that matters to them. It’s much less engaging to bounce around from topic to topic within a campaign. Instead, dig deep into one strategic objective.
On top of that, most influencers consider single-topic campaigns to be the easiest to implement compared to multi-topic email campaigns. That’s because you only need to provide value in one area, instead of trying to provide value in several areas for one campaign.
To implement a single-topic campaign, choose one of your customer’s pain points and build an entire campaign around a solution.
2. New Subscriber Welcome Emails
It’s no wonder that 39% of influencers said that this was one of the most effective tactics for improving engagement.
It makes sense. Someone signs up for your mailing list because they are expecting to want to hear more from your brand in the future.
Imagine if you didn’t send them an email when they did so? It sends the message that your brand doesn’t care to further the relationship with the lead.
Most email marketing automation platforms will make it easy for you to set up welcome emails that occur almost immediately after the lead enters their address.
You don’t want to make them wait, which is why it’s not recommended to send these out manually, no matter how small your list.
3. Automated/Event-Triggered Emails
These types of emails depend on modern marketing automation platform.
Because of this, they might take a bit of work to set up but are highly effective. Imagine a lead looks at your product page. You can send them a relevant email with a coupon or demo, so that they can try your offering risk-free.
That’s why 37% of marketers rated this tactic amongst the most effective.
Using event-based, automated emails will make it easier for you to constantly serve your audience highly-relevant content.
4. Newsletters With Owned Content
Sending out monthly newsletters with content your brand creates is a great way to breathe new life into last month’s blog posts.
In Ascend2’s survey, 33% of marketers thought that this was an effective strategy to improve email engagement.
You should be collecting metrics on your blog posts. If you don’t already, you can do so for free on Google Analytics. Now determine what the most popular new posts this month are and create a newsletter that features this content.
It may not be as effective as a single-topic email campaign, but it is a great additional tactic to add to your email marketing arsenal.
5. Integrated Social Media Campaigns
Hitting your leads on multiple channels outside of just email is a great way to ensure that your leads have your brand in mind.
In the survey, 32% of influencers said that this was one of the most effective strategies for improving engagement.
After all, a user who expressed interest in a mailing list might also be intersted in seeing related content on social media. Connecting across multiple channels will only strengthen the relationship between the user and brand.
This is one of the most difficult areas to implement, with 44% of influencers saying that it took the most effort to put into place.
But that effort might be well worth it. Social media is one of the best tools to reach a wide audience. Keep that in mind when you are putting together campaigns. If you can reach customers on multiple channels, you will have a higher chance of success.
Try out these tactics and see what ones work for you. Make sure you start by tracking engagement before making any changes. Then, one at a time, test each tactic for a month or two, seeing how the changes affect your engagement rate.
Measure clicks, opens, and form completions. When you determine a tactic is effective, keep it. If it doesn’t serve you, consider changing how you implement the tactic or stop using it.
Let us know how it goes.
List Question
- What tactics have you used to encourage email engagement?
- Do you buy third-party leads or contact information?
- Did we miss anything on this list?
