Engaging Email Subscribers Part Two: 5 Tips to Keep Them Engaged

ISPs such as Gmail now measure engagement as part of their filtering process, meaning inactive subscribers can impact your deliverability to the inbox. As discussed in “Tips to Keep Subscribers Engaged: Part 1,” there are a number of steps email marketers can take to help ensure their subscribers are opening and taking action in their emails.

Here, we expand upon that list, sharing five additional tips you can implement in your email marketing to help keep subscribers engaged.

Keep it Short

Think of your personal email inbox. If you aren’t constantly checking, organizing and deleting your email throughout the day on your smartphone, personal laptop or tablet, you can be inundated with messages when your workday is done. The last thing you want to see when opening any of those emails are lengthy blocks of text.

In this sense, email communications are much like blog posts: both should be kept short, relevant and include a mixture of text and visual content. (HubSpot shares nine great examples of visually balanced emails here.) For email marketers, this also means limiting actionable items like CTAs.

Share Valuable Content

Your subscribers will engage with your messages if they find the content to be relevant and valuable. If you take the time to think about what your subscribers really want, then carefully craft your email marketing program to address their interests and the stage of the buying process they’re in, you’ll increase your open rate and dramatically reduce the number of email unsubscribe requests you receive.

The opposite is also true: If you email irrelevant or uninteresting to your subscribers, you’ll experience high volumes of email unsubscribe requests and, worse, spam complaints.

Show the Love

When was the last time you received marketing communication and thought, “Wow, this company really cares about me”? Oftentimes, email marketers forget just how far showing a little TLC to their subscribers can go in terms of nurturing relationships to develop brand advocates and drive sales – not to mention keeping open rates up.

Show your subscribers a little love by sending personalized thank you notes after purchases or downloading content, apology notes following poor product or service experiences or website glitches for readability and courteous reminder messages to reorder products or open those pieces of content they downloaded.

Showcase Your Subscribers

Think back to yearbook delivery day in high school. When you finally got your hands on your copy, you didn’t open to page one and peruse photos left to right, page by page. No, you eagerly flipped through the pages to find your class photo. You can ignite that same kind of excitement in email marketing by including a customer spotlight in your email communications.

Interview your customers to learn about their history or experiences with your company, then showcase those stories. Your leads will see just how much you care about the people who purchase your products or services, and those who are highlighted will be anxious to receive your communication and forward it on to friends and family.

Offer Incentives

When it comes to email subject lines, FREE is the ultimate four-letter word. Don’t be afraid to offer your subscribers discount codes, freebies or exclusive subscriber sales deals on special occasions like holidays.

If you choose to implement this tactic, be sure to offer your subscribers items they will be interested in. “For example,” writes Corey Eridon on HubSpot, “if I noticed a segment of my list was particularly interested in educational inbound marketing content, I might invite them to attend our Inbound 2012 conference with a discount for certification at the conference.”

In Part 3 of our Engaging Email Subscribers series, we’ll discuss email refreshes your company can make to re-engage inactive subscribers.

Are you ready to implement our engagement techniques? Download “20 Great Ways to Grow Your Email List” for tips on boosting your number of subscribers to engage!

Photo Credit: RambergMediaImages