6 Rules of Email Engagement

Growing your email list is important, but what marketers need to spend time on is engagement; to assure that list growth doesn't turn into attrition by loosing valuable subscribers.  This not only helps them to stay interested in what you have to say, it also helps in the deliverability of your message.  That's why I've put together the six rules of engagement, ways that you can help keep subscribers opening, reading, clicking through and converting.  While my language may not be as colorful as Sam Jackson's in Rules of Engagement here are some essential steps to make sure that you have an engaged audience:

Setting up expectations

At the point a contact signs up for you message you will want to set up expectations around what they will be receiving.  Make sure they understand what the value of the emails will be.  Is it exclusive discounts?  Informational content?  New product announcements?  This will ensure that people know what to look forward to.  You can also set expectations around how often your contacts will hear from you.  Make sure to follow through with whatever you promise them, other wise you run a big risk of them hitting the spam button.

Home Science Tools has a great sign up page that sets expectations, and even has sample messages for contacts to view.

Bonus: The sign up process is also a great time to ask for personalized info and give contacts something to look forward to. Ex: gathering birthdate and set the expectation that they will get ‘something special’ for their birthday.

Provide relevant content

Sending segmented messages based on a contacts preferences, performance or past purchase history can show them that you are listening to them and make you stand out from the rest of the pack.  If you know your contact’s demographic or preference info then utilize it to send them messages they will find relevant.  Ex: segmenting by gender and sending promotional emails with appropriate products for male or female contacts.

Send targeted messages

Targeted messages can be a great way to engage with your audience, especially a contact who has potentially become less engaged lately.  This takes the idea of relevant messages one step further by being very personalized.  The more targeted you can make the message the more likely you will see a good response rate.  This can be why having many data points on a contact can be very helpful. These messages are typically one off sends, and automated with dynamic content or dynamic tags.

Examples include:

• Birthday Message
• Abandoned cart messages
• Product review messages

Making life easier for your contacts and they will engage

People want their lives to be made easy.  We’re all busy and any email that can help a contact do something they would otherwise have to remember on their own would be seen as a benefit.

Examples include:

• Post purchase message
• Gift reminders
• Re-order reminders
• New product announcements

Maintaining expectations

You talked the talk… now you need to walk that walk.

If you said you were going to send bi-weekly messages, have that system set in place and make sure you stick to it.  If you said you would send a b-day discount then you need to send one.  You want to be seen as a positive and helpful resource for your contacts, and the easiest way of doing this is by simply following through with what you say to them.  Remember, that spam button becomes very tempting if contacts feel they have been lied to.

Good hygiene!

Clean your list, and keep it clean.  A clean list is a list of people that will have a higher likely hood of opening and converting from your messages.  If your list gets old, or if your acquisition process is less then perfect, then you may have a larger list, but it will consist of a lot of dead weight that will weigh down your metrics and keep you from realizing your true metrics.  A poor list can also cause a variety of deliverability problems.

Stick with these six tips and explore other ways to help them stay engaged.  When you lose engaged subscribers, it not only hurts your email list, it hurts your revenue.  Be sure to keep the subscriber in mind when building and maintaining your email program.  Have you found any other great ways to keep subscribers engaged?  If so, share below!

Kestrel Lemen
Marketing Strategist at Bronto
@Kestrelbird