Inbound Marketing Insights

When done correctly, email marketing can increase your engagement with contacts, drive re-engaged leads, and turn those leads into customers. However, millions of emails still go unopened and unread every day. So what can you do to make sure your contacts are engaging with your emails?

We asked marketing professionals and business leaders this question for their best insights. From sharing customer stories to choosing the right days and times to send an email, there are many strategies you may employ to boost your email marketing engagement. Here are 15 ways these leaders use to increase their email marketing engagement:

• Share Customer Stories

• Make Your Subject Line a Priority
• Personalize the Delivery Time of Your Email Campaigns

• Include Only One Call-to-Action

• Write in a Casual and Fun Tone

• Segment Your Email Marketing List

• Create Personalized Emails

• Invite Commentary and Questions in Your Email Marketing

• Add Video Content

• Include Social Sharing Options

• Do A/B Split-Testing

• Optimize Your Content for Mobile Phones

• Use GIFs to Increase Interaction

• Use Workflows to Trigger Email Sends Based On Behaviors
• Choose the Right Timing

Share Customer Stories
We've seen excellent email engagement by sharing firsthand customer experiences with our product. For people in the middle or bottom of the funnel, these stories are a great way to see how other users get value from our product and do a great job driving them back to our website. Right now, we're playing around with using user quotes as the subject line to increase open rates as well!

Quincy Smith, TEFL Hero

Make Your Subject Line a Priority
Focus on your subject line. To increase customer engagement via email marketing, you must first increase your open rates. To do that, you must have a catchy subject line that prompts your recipient to open up your email in the first place. Use humor, curiosity, and the fear of missing out to engage with your customers and reach your business goals.

Melanie Edwards, Olipop

Personalize the Delivery Time of Your Email Campaigns

Sending emails on the same day and time to everyone on your list or in your database is a thing of the past. People engage with their emails differently and open and click emails at different times of the day. Consider how you can improve your email marketing engagement by sending your emails at the exact time of day that someone is most likely to engage. Send-time personalization for email marketing allows you to personalize automated email campaigns strategically. Using AI, you can ensure emails are delivered to each individual at the optimal engagement time based on engagement data in your automation platform. For example, if you open emails at 8 PM, but your colleague opens them at 5 AM, you can personalize your emails to deliver at that exact time of the day. By delivering emails at the right time and frequency, you increase the odds of reaching the top of the inbox when your prospects are making their purchasing decisions. This dramatically helps your engagement rate because your emails are delivered at an optimal day and time.

Elyse Flynn Meyer, Prism Global Marketing Solutions

Include Only One Call-to-Action
An email marketing campaign needs to be singularly focused. Therefore, it is essential that you refrain from requesting multiple actions. The sheer volume of daily emails can be overwhelming, limiting their desire to act on a request, so adding to that mess would be ill-advised. 

By including only one call to action, making your message clear and concise, and ensuring that links within the email reinforce your CTA, you will make it straightforward for your customers while reducing the stress of taking many actions. Though it may be tempting to put in as many offers as possible, you will ensure greater engagement rates and success by resisting that urge and focusing on making your content as easy and limited in required action as possible.

Matt Miller, Embroker

Write in a Casual and Fun Tone
The best way to increase your email engagement is to use quick and casual writing like you are talking with subscribers instead of sending them long paragraphs that look like an essay. No one likes to read long paragraphs, so send emails in simple and easy words, so users can easily understand what you want to say. 

I've noticed that most emails are written as if they're forcing customers to subscribe to a list — or buy something, but this reduces your email engagement rather than increases. This makes people prefer to delete your emails rather than read them. Show the value you bring your subscribers or what you will do for them. Most marketers focus on other things rather than this — which is the core of everything.

Lachlan de Crespigny, Revelo

Segment Your Email Marketing List
Email marketing should be segmented. When you segment your email marketing list, you can send the correct message to the appropriate customer base considering the time of the customer's buying process. This is critical for increasing conversions. To send more likely-to-convert segmented emails, combine your email and advertising software with your CRM and other source materials of customer data. The segmentation gives you a complete overview of your connections, including those on your email advertising platform. Sending highly tailored emails based on your users' groups, subscriptions, and other properties becomes more accessible than ever.

Muskan Rai, WebHostingAdvices

Create Personalized Emails
Personalized emails are among the essential tools in your email marketing toolkit. They are not only an excellent method for keeping your email subscribers interested. They're an effective tool for boosting response rates, improving click-through rates, and increasing conversion rates, all of which are essential metrics. The process of personalizing the emails that you send is not overly complicated. You need to gather as much information as possible about your subscribers and then use that information to personalize the emails you send to each subscriber. Personalization is key to successfully communicating the right message to the right person at the right time.

Hilary Kozak, LivSmooth

Invite Commentary and Questions in Your Email Marketing
Ask subscribers to respond directly to your email with their questions and comments, then surprise them with a thoughtful, personalized response. Most consumers realize email marketing is generally automated but have grown to expect no-reply sender addresses or to get lost in long support queues if an issue needs resolution. 

Your next email may include a follow-on headline such as, "Clients Jessica and Mark had something to say, do you agree?" By publicly validating subscriber responses, you'll encourage more feedback and engagement while also learning how to best tailor the next set of outgoing messages for your audience.

Tommy Chang, Homelister

Add Video Content
In today's culture of short attention spans, you have limited time to grab people's attention. Sadly, no matter how witty or engaging the content, most don't have time to read blocks of text. Every screenwriter is taught the "show, don't tell" rule, which is also the rule across every platform or piece of marketing material if you want to hold anyone's attention. Increase your email engagement with video or run the risk of being left behind.

Erin Banta, Pepper

Include Social Sharing Options
Undoubtedly, the receiver will see an email you send to their inbox. How effectively you encourage interaction with that email will determine what happens next. Emails with social sharing buttons have a 158% greater click-through- rate. Even if the offers you've included don't appeal to your readers, they might share the message with a friend or work colleague. It's crucial to make that process as simple as possible. Therefore, be sure to have buttons that allow users to follow and like your company on the main social networks. To increase the reach of your email campaigns, promote them on social media.

Michael Garrico, Total Shape

Do A/B Split-Testing
A/B split testing is one of the most effective ways to increase email marketing engagement. It's a simple process: you create two different versions of an email, send them to a small subset of your audience, and compare their open rates. You can use this data to determine which version was more successful and send future emails from that version. 

You can use this information to determine whether one version received more opens than another or if there wasn't much difference between them. If one version received more opens than another, you'd want to keep sending that version in the future; if there was little difference between them and both performed equally well, then you should continue using the format that performed better initially.

Tiffany Homan, Texas Divorce Laws

Optimize Your Content for Mobile Phones
Make sure your email is mobile-friendly. In August 2022, mobile internet usage accounted for nearly 60% of global web traffic — an enormous percentage. With numbers like that, there's no excuse for sending emails that warp on phones. If you want good email marketing engagement, you have to ensure your customers see the same content and quality regardless of where they check their inbox. Optimizing your marketing for mobile is a vital part of that.

Rachel Reid, Subtl Beauty

Use GIFs to Increase Interaction 
You can increase email conversions and click-through rates by incorporating interactive features like GIFs. Your subscribers are enticed to engage with your company because GIFs pique their curiosity. A great GIF has an emotional component. GIFs can be effective if you want people to be enthusiastic about your email offer. It grabs the viewer's attention and serves as a visual reminder. They perform admirably and are easy to apply. It has been found in studies that GIFs improve online interaction and can boost email conversion rates. According to research, animated GIF emails can raise click-through rates by over 25%. Thus, it serves as an excellent strategy to increase email marketing engagement!

Alexander Reid, TriviaWhizz

Use Workflows to Trigger Email Sends Based On Behaviors
At PartnerStack, our emails with the highest engagement rates tend to be the ones that are triggered by behavior that the recipient has taken. For example, we automatically trigger HubSpot emails asking users to provide a review after they've reached a milestone. These emails have average open rates of ~50% and click rates of ~20%. When we send a regular blast email, we typically see open rates of only ~20% and click rates of ~5%. Think about how you can trigger emails throughout the buyers' journey to increase email marketing engagement.

Joe Kevens, B2B SaaS Reviews (and PartnerStack)

Choose the Right Timing
Email marketing is an unpredictable game of getting customers to click on your site. But keeping it regular may interest the client to dive deep into it. The art of being consistent with new offers every day is the way to reach the mind of consumers. While arranging your emails, make sure to send them more on free days and weekends. Since people are free these days, they tend to open up and react to it. Another way to increase your email marketing is by sending them in between off-work hours. Office times like after lunch or before leaving the office are hard to pass for workers. They look out for time-pass alternatives. Sending your emails at this time will make them open them on the ledge to pass the time. Hence increases the chances of your email marketing.

Agnes Zabawa, Insurance Navy

If you're interested in discussing your current email marketing strategy and how you can start to improve your email engagement results, we invite you to schedule an inbound marketing consultation.