By Susie Castellanos Hansley, iContact Deliverability Specialist
“Engagement” is a word that is getting a lot of attention in email marketing circles these days. If you haven’t heard it before, let’s clarify: It does not refer to making a lifetime commitment to open, read and cherish your emails, forever and ever, ‘til browser incompatibilities or a particularly compelling YouTube video do you part. Rather, engagement in email marketing refers to whether email recipients are opening, clicking, and forwarding your messages.
The root of engagement is the verb engage, and these definitions from thefreedictionary.com encapsulate the feelings we want to engender in our contacts when they receive our emails:
- To attract and hold the attention of; engross: Her hobby engaged her for hours at a time.
- To win over or attract: His smile engages everyone he meets.
- To draw into; involve: Try to engage a shy person in conversation.
What email marketer doesn’t want engaged readers? Can you imagine what your sales and tracking results would be if your readers were so engrossed and drawn into your emails that they opened your messages as soon as they hit the inbox, clicked on the links, and shared the messages?
Obviously, the desire for interested, active readers is not a new thing. Everyone wants engaged recipients who open and click on links. So why has “engagement” become such a recent buzzword in email marketing circles?
The Perils of Low Engagement
The emphasis on engagement in email marketing has come about because of the ways email providers—particularly Gmail—have changed their engagement metrics to determine whether emails are wanted by their recipients. With these metrics, senders whose messages result in high engagement —i.e., opens, clicks, and forwards—from their readers earn a better sender reputation. The better your sender reputation, the more likely you are to get your emails into those inboxes in the first place.
Conversely, senders whose emails generate low engagement—i.e., low open rates, delayed opens, deletion of messages, or lack of action—earn a worse sender reputation. As a recent Huffington Post blog entry noted, “Major email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL have implemented new algorithms for email deliverability based on ‘engagement.’ If your emails are not triggering sufficient interaction, they are likely not to be delivered.” That’s right—poor engagement now leads to poor deliverability.
Some Tips to Improve Engagement
Sending good content is obviously key in engaging your subscribers, but it is not the only thing you can do to drive up those critical engagement rates. Here are five tips:
- Follow basic best practices for obtaining leads. People who don’t want your emails won’t read them. Review your opt-in process to ensure you’re doing the right things and not the wrong things.
- Send targeted emails. Too many marketers send a blast to their entire lists, reducing the effectiveness of their messaging. Segmenting your contacts according to their interests and sending them targeted information improves engagement.
- Practice regular list hygiene by re-engaging disengaged subscribers. Win back disengaged email subscribers by following the tips outlined here. I recommend performing ongoing maintenance by sending re-engagement emails to subscribers who subscribed to your list over six months ago and have not opened a single message in those six months. Email marketers with higher send frequencies may want to perform this task more often—perhaps every three months.
- Eliminate disengaged contacts from your list. If you have contacts whom you’ve already attempted to re-engage but who still do not open your messages or click your links, it is probably best to permanently remove them from your list. I recommend removing any contacts added over 12 months ago who have not opened a single message in the past year. If you are an iContact managed account customer, your Strategic Advisor can assist you with this.
- Hire an email marketing analyst. iContact offers Strategic Advisors who will look at your sending content, sending patterns, tracking histories, and lists to help you devise a marketing strategy to improve your engagement.
Do you have any additional tips to share on how to re-engage disengaged contacts? Can you offer other insights on this topic? We’d love to hear from you below!
