How to Boost Engagement Rates with Your Email List

Do you often find yourself frustrated by the engagement rate of your email list? If your open rates and click through rates are down, you might need to work on boosting the overall engagement of your list to ensure that your messages are ending up in your recipient’s inbox as opposed to their promotions or spam folders. In this post, we’re going to look at some tips to help you do just that.

Know how to use each element of your email.

No matter what your goal is for your email list, you will never accomplish it if people are not opening your emails. When you know the job of each element of your email, you will increase the likelihood that people will start opening more of your emails.

First, you have your subject line. This is the most important part of your email as this is the thing that will encourage people to open your email, archive it delete it, or spam it. Hence, the main goal of your subject line is to get people to open the email. That’s it.

You don’t have to sell yourself, your business, your products, or your services in the subject line. You just have to get people curious or excited enough about what is inside your email to make them want to open it.

Next, you have your preview line. This is the first bit of text in your email that appears in most inboxes as a preview for the email content.

Here’s what it looks like in conjunction with your email subject line.

As you can see, this is an important way to effectively “extend” your subject line. Since the experts recommend short subject lines for maximum effect, you will need the preview line to get even more of your message across.

One of the common mistakes with preview lines is to use an email template that starts with “Can’t read this email? Open it in your browser.” or similar. If that is the top of your email template, look into ways to add a line of text above it, even if you have to do it with white text to “hide it” on a white background.

Ask people to reply.

Email providers like to see that people are engaging with your emails. One easy way to get engagement for your emails is to simply ask people to reply. Here are a few ways to make it happen.

• If you send out a product announcement, ask people who might have any questions to reply to the email.
• If you send out a weekly newsletter of content, ask people to reply to the email and you know what subjects you should cover on your blog next.

You don’t necessarily want to overshadow the main purpose of the email, such as clicking on a link to your sales page, with your call to action to reply. Hence, include this in your PS or near the end of the email.

Overall, if you want to increase replies from subscribers to your emails without adding specific calls to action, you can do so by using an email that invites replies (such as [email protected]). Also, remove any text from your emails that tells people you don’t read replies to your emails. Yes, you will have to monitor your inbox more closely, but the result will be better deliverability.

Ask people to forward to a friend.

Another way to encourage engagement with your emails and improve the growth of your business as a whole is to include a call to action to forward the email to a friend. This can be as simple as a link in the footer. Since most people can easily forward emails using their email service, it’s mostly used to remind people that forwarding is a great way to share with friends and colleagues who might be interested in the email content.

Again, you don’t want this to take away from your email’s main call to action. Think of it as more of a way for people who do take action on your email to forward it if they like thing you are promoting.

Prune your email list regularly.

Last, but not least, be sure to prune your list regularly. Most email marketing software will allow you to search for people in your list who have not opened your emails for a specific length of time. If you have been sending emails weekly, and someone hasn’t opened any of them in the last six months, it’s safe to say that they are an inactive subscriber and should be removed from your list.

In order to be able to do this, you will need to send emails that are trackable. In most cases, you will just need to use an HTML template from your email marketing software as some text-only email formats will not include the tracking pixel needed to determine if an email has been opened.

There are a few benefits to pruning your list. For starters, you will pay less for your email marketing software, as most charge by the number of subscribers. You will also get better overall deliverability rates based on the increase in open rates for your emails. From a customer perspective, you will stop invading the inbox of people who are just filtering or deleting your emails.

In Conclusion

Want to dive further into the world of email deliverability? Be sure to find guides provided by your email marketing software like Aweber, MailChimp, and InfusionSoft.