The holiday season is the busiest and the most exciting time of the year for businesses, especially the ones in retail. It presents a great opportunity to make up for all the sales shortfalls through the year, luring the customers with exclusive festive season offers and discounts. This entails that the marketing efforts are on overdrive, with frequent tweaking as per the regular sales report and market performance; which brings us to the topic of a significant marketing avenue, one that attracts the most potential of all. Yes, we are talking about your email marketing campaign.

Email marketing is one of the most potent online marketing tools in your hands to reach out to the target audience, compelling them to take action.

• More than 29% of marketers consider email marketing as the most effective channel to reach out to the target audience. 93% of marketers use email for content distribution across multiple channels.
  
• Emails are known to generate a staggering 4200% ROI for businesses.

The high efficacy of email marketing strategy also makes it one of the most common channels for promotion. The majority of businesses, starting from a start-up and small-mid level company to a large corporation rely on emails to engage with the customers; to turn leads into conversions.

However, since company emailers are more or less a one-way street of communication compared to social media channels and online ad campaigns, creating an email engagement strategy is as daunting.

Let’s take a moment and think from the perspective of a customer; the inboxes get flooded with emails from different brands every day. But, how many of them get noticed, opened, and read? Email marketing leads can be only generated and converted if the target audience engages with the promotional mail, and that’s where we come to the relevance of email engagement.

The question is, with so many brands sending emails to your target audience, how do you ensure that your email will be read? How do you make sure that the mail does not end up in the trash or spam? What can you do to get the recipient to click on the CTA button?

We are going to address all that in this write-up so that in this last leg of the holiday shopping season, you can increase sales by tweaking your email engagement strategy accordingly.

Metrics of Good Email Engagement:

The rising concerns over user safety issues have led to notable changes in the mail privacy policy of many big brands, making it more difficult for marketers to analyze the metrics of email engagement. For instance, Apple’s recent privacy policy update does not allow the email sender to track the information of customers who open the mail.

While that is one of the ways to measure engagement, others can suffice your need for insight. You can gather intel by analyzing the clicks and conversions; how many people clicked the CTA following it up with a purchase. According to experts, anything between 2-2.6% is considered a good click rate.

Read More:

Business Benefits of Integrating Social Media Marketing with Email Marketing

Ways to Improve Email Engagement:

In case your click rate is hovering in the low percentages, here are a few tips that will help you develop a better email engagement strategy.

1. Prune the Invalid Emails: It is important to cleanse your mail list regularly to prune the invalid and spam emails that have crept in along with the valid addresses. If you are thinking of starting a fresh campaign, then start by sorting out the spam ids.
   
   Why it is important? It is because invalid ids lead to mail bouncing. If too many emails get bounced then that is not good for the reputation of the brand. Frequent and mass bouncing of mails would make you a designated spammer. If you have more than one spam complaint in every 1000 emails then your entire campaign might end up in the spam folder.
   
   Hence, a regular mail list cleansing is very important. A small suggestion here; you can streamline the process (post-cleanup) by introducing a mail verification process for the users so that your promotional email ends up in the inboxes of valid ids.
   
2. Identify Your Inactive Subscribers, Take Action: Other than invalid mails, there are inactive users too who can impact the email engagement negatively. So, keep these in your email marketing strategy; if the recipient does not open your mails, the inbox provider deems your mails and the content as irrelevant and junk. Oftentimes, users abandon their mail ids, which might get recycled into spam traps by ISPs or blacklist providers.
   
   Here’s how you can mitigate this issue; if an email id has shown no sign of engagement in the last six months, try to re-engage with them with special offers. If they still do not respond, it is best to remove them from the mailing list.
   
3. Produce Quality Content: Another reason why your emails are failing to generate the desired engagement might be the quality of the content. So, once you have deleted the invalid emails and inactive users, take some time to analyze the quality of the content. You can run a comparative analysis with the competitor emails as well.
   
   The content has to be compelling enough for your target audience to take action. You can segregate the best performing and worst-performing newsletters and see the hit and the miss engagement-wise. Once you are clear of what the people like in your email marketing campaign, the strategizing becomes easy.
   

Here are a few extra tips to boost your email engagement strategy:

• Keep the unsubscribe option visible in your emails, making it easier for people to just unfollow your newsletter. It helps in decluttering.
• Use tools to check if your emails are ending up in the spam folder or the inbox.
• Automate your mailing list and create relevant content.
• During peak season, like the festive time, it works better if you increase the frequency of your newsletter. It keeps you more visible in the eyes of the user.

9 Proven Ways To Reduce Your Email Unsubscription Rate

Your email marketing campaign is as effective as the strategies you develop to garner maximum engagement. Use these tips to boost your engagement with the target audience and witness your sales skyrocket in no time.