Have your email marketing campaigns lost steam? Are you seeing a downward trend in subscriber engagement? If so, you need to inject new life into your email program, and quickly! It’s a natural symptom of any campaign to lose momentum, which is why marketers must work proactively to constantly improve, refine, and add innovation to their email messages.
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Adding new message types may be the most effective way to increase engagement and improve the overall user experience. Triggered messages, welcome and confirmation emails, all have higher than average open rates when compared to standard content mailed. Even if you don’t feel a confirmation is necessary, for example a subscriber updating their profile, it may be in your best interest to send one of these messages anyway. The higher overall engagement that you’ll see in terms of opens and clicks can provide you with a big boost- especially with ISPs like Gmail that highly value user engagement.
Another inevitability of email campaigns is subscribers who never engage, or have not interacted with your messages in many months. A glut of these subscribers will eat away at user engagement, which can be harmful to your sending reputation, and may also lead to an increase in spam complaints. Using advanced subscriber segmentation, you can identify these subscribers and remove them before they complain or add to list stagnation. Proactively cutting down your subscriber list will save you time and money by only focusing on the subscribers you know are interested.
Beyond focusing on these obvious problem points, it’s also important to look at your entire email experience from the stand point of a subscriber. Would YOU like to receive message this often? Is the content you’re mailing truthfully what you would expect to receive as a subscriber? It’s very possible that you honestly answer yes to both of these questions, but just that isn’t enough. Utilizing an unsubscribe survey will give you a less biased view of what your subscribers really think, and will give insight into how your campaign can be improved.
In addition to improving campaign quality through optimized message frequency and better content, it’s important that messages being sent are rendered correctly on all devices. Email tests are crucial to making sure that messages look on point, it’s nearly impossible to account for the rendering on all popular devices and environments by yourself. Another important facet is using responsive design to improve user experience- far too many marketers are never, or rarely using responsive design in their emails. This is despite the fact that mobile devices are continuing to increase their market share! As mobile users continue to increase, the lack of responsive design will only lead to fewer of these subscribers opening your messages and more of them unsubscribing.
