How to Boost Customer Engagement through Email Marketing

Expectations amongst customers to be understood by businesses on a deeper level has risen massively in recent years. Some businesses have been slow to identify this and as a result, their customer engagement rates have fallen.

Engaging with customers is an adapt or die situation. Businesses are not the ones calling the shots here. It’s the customers that decide how things are going to go down. If you ignore them, you will face the repercussions.

Using your customer data to understand them is the first part of any campaign, not just for email marketing. 

There are multiple ways to use your data to inform your email efforts. But the first steps are always done before you even think about building out your campaign.

How To Treat Your Data

The way you treat your data is incredibly important for your marketing performance. Not knowing your customers properly and trying to increase customer engagement at the same time will likely lead to a high churn rate. You need to show them you know them.

72% of customers don’t interact with messages that aren’t aimed directly at them. That’s a lot of customers disengaged with your business, all down to the fact that you aren’t using your data properly.

Data quality

The quality of your data is incredibly important when it comes to your campaigns. The level of personalisation you can carry out is determined by the standard of your data. If you haven’t done so already, you need to consolidate your data. It makes it much easier to understand your customer and utilise it. You’ll also find the quality of your data will increase with consolidation. This is down to the fact that you understand their behaviours, wants, and needs on a deeper level. The relevance of your campaigns for the recipient will improve significantly as well.

There are plenty of different types of data you can, and should, include. The more customer data you include, the better your campaign will be. Start by using demographical, behavioural, or transactional data to build customer profiles. Your campaigns will provide a much richer experience because of it.

Segmentation

Segmenting your customers results in more relevant campaigns and messaging. It’s much more important than you might think when it comes to delivering results. You need to make sure what you’re sending is relevant to the customer, and segmentation is important to ensure this. Your level of customer engagement relies on it.

Segmentation is where you can identify a particular group to target with a certain message or offer. Sending an irrelevant campaign will have a major effect on your engagement rates for that particular promotion. Not everyone is interested in the same thing, so don’t think you can create one campaign that will interest everyone.

What To Include In Your Emails

Eye-catching subject lines

Your subject line is likely to be the first thing a person notices about your email. Don’t underestimate how important they are. They could be the deciding factor on whether your email is even opened or not.

You should use this opportunity to show your customer you know them from the start. Personalising the subject line can lead to an increase in interaction rates. Using someone’s name in the subject line increases email open rates by 26%. Your data can be used in almost every part of your campaign, so always keep that in mind.

Creating a sense of urgency can nudge your customers to take more notice of your email. Catchy or direct subject lines and the use of emojis will also help grab attention.

You should be trying to pique your customer’s interest or excite them with compelling offers. The aim is to nudge the reader towards taking action. But, you don’t want to come across spammy either. You want your customers to click through and take action. Not scroll down to the unsubscribe link.

Clear concise CTAs

Your email engagement rates will improve with a clear call to action for your customers to follow. Emails that include a good CTA perform better than those that don’t include them at all.

People consume a huge amount of content everyday. Realistically, they won’t take action on everything they receive. You need to make it super clear what the intended action is as they likely won’t read the entire email either. You’ll need to be the one to prompt them to take action and click through your particular piece of content.

A clear CTA also gives a specific goal to complete, so customers know where to go to take action.

Images & dynamic content 

Increasing your interaction rates is achieved by showing relevant content to your customers. Of course, there are plenty of things you can do to improve your email marketing performance. Using dynamic content and images can give you an advantage here.

Humans are what are known as “visual beings”, meaning that the majority of information that our brain absorbs comes from visual cues. So, visual media is a great way of improving customer engagement for your email campaigns. 

With the use of images, you can show someone exactly what they left in their basket. Or, even show them other products that complement what they have just purchased. There are numerous ways you can use images in your campaigns. 

Using dynamic content makes your campaigns far more personal and much more interesting.

Types Of Campaigns To Boost Engagement

Abandoned cart emails

When it comes to customer engagement, there are few campaigns that catch the customer’s eye like an abandoned cart email. These are especially popular among businesses that want to win back those who have left your site without completing their purchase.

There are a multitude of reasons why a customer abandons their basket. It could be down to your shipping prices, or maybe they just want to shop around and compare prices. Maybe they just got distracted. The point of this type of campaign is to get the customer back to where they left off and entice them to complete the purchase.

In order to boost customer engagement here, it’s important that you use segmentation. Your customers won’t all be making the same types of purchases. So sending them all the same type of abandoned cart emails won’t work. Did a new prospect add a lower cost item to their cart? Perhaps offering a discount on their purchase might win them back. Or maybe a returning customer has put in a large order that they have yet to complete and they just need a nudge to return to it.

Respond in a way that shows you know your customer and entice them with something that will make them come back.

Automated onboarding campaigns

According to a study by McKinsey, 52% of customers leave a business after a poor onboarding experience. You need to make sure that your customer understands you as much as you understand them from the very start.

Onboarding campaigns can be done through multiple channels. But email is always one to bank on for success. 

Welcome new customers with a series of perfectly crafted emails triggered by a key event like account creation or first purchase. Get the relationship off to a positive start and increase their Lifetime Value in the long run.

Recurring campaigns

It’s important that you consistently stay in touch with your customers. This can help in creating a community of people, rather than just contacting them when you need them to complete a business goal.

Your customer engagement rate will grow if you stay in touch with them on a regular basis with things they are interested in.

Create recurring email campaigns that populate with dynamic, personalised content based on the recipient’s preferences and profile attributes. How often they receive these can be up to you, so long as you don’t annoy your customers by doing so.

Test Your Campaigns

Campaigns are rarely ever flawless. There’s always something that can be improved. After all, your customers will always provide you with a few surprises along the way.

A/B testing allows you to test different messages and understand what works and what doesn’t. It helps you create better campaigns for the future as well. You’ll find that the more you analyse and refine your messaging, customer engagement and sales will increase.

You should make testing different variations of your emails part of your campaign design. Remember, what works for some people won’t work for others. Understanding elements that work well for your campaigns means that you can take this information to improve them in the future.

Reflect And Go Again

Getting everything right will take time. Even when things do start to work out they won’t ever be 100% perfect. There’s no such thing as perfection.

It’s important that you reflect on campaigns you have run and keep testing. Introduce new pieces of data or start to include different media to keep customers interested.

When done right, email marketing is a really powerful and cost-effective marketing channel. The idea that email marketing is a thing of the past simply isn’t true. Many businesses are seeing great results from email and with the right customer data and resources, you can too.

To learn more about how Xtremepush can help you improve customer engagement through email marketing campaigns, book a demo with a member of our team today.