Email marketing has long been an effective strategy for converting leads, re-engaging customers, and strengthening brand loyalty. So especially if you are a small business owner, getting into the email newsletter world is never a bad idea.
First of all, don’t worry much because you aren’t on your own. After all, most companies struggle to increase their engagement rates and find it one of their biggest challenges.
Nevertheless, in this article, we will show you the tips you must follow to increase user engagement.
7 Tips to increase user engagement through email newsletters
- Test your subject lines and content
Like many other marketing tactics, testing should be essential to your strategy. This counts for your subject line and the type of content you include in your newsletter. In addition, email marketing platforms allow you to undergo A/B testing with your messages.
A/B testings will send out two email versions for your subscribers or even a segment of subscribers. A/B testing will allow you to distinguish between the two versions and identify what you need to keep and discard in the future.
Moreover, you can test anything in your newsletter, but you should focus on the following variables:
- Subject lines: Your subject line is what gives your audience the first impression of your readers. Unless you make your subject line really persuasive and exciting, it’ll end up in the junk folder. It’s good to try experimenting with all the methods you can, including some humor and urgency in your subject lines. After all, it doesn’t hurt to try all these methods.
- Send out times: Newsletters can be more effective when you choose which day to send them out. For example, it’s important to choose the time of the day, or week, for sending out a newsletter. After all, it’ll depend on your audience and when they are available times. For example, maybe you are targeting a school audience; ideal available times will be around 4 P.M or right after they finish school hours.
- Content: You can test which kind of content is more appealing. Try including some storytelling that will build up throughout the email to engage your audience.
Above all, A/B testing is important, so you can continuously try it until you see progress with your emails.
- Email templates
Email templates are all around, and some of the best email marketing platforms offer free templates that you can use to save time and not create anything from scratch. However, when considering email templates, here are a few things you need to keep in mind:
- Ensure that all of your newsletters and emails include your brand’s logo, colors, and additional information they need regarding your brand.
- Select ready-made or design templates based on the most responsive designs you have identified.
- Keep your newsletter design consistent, which will help your subscribers become more familiar with what they are looking forward to.
Moreover, suppose you want to make your newsletter more interesting. In that case, you can try to include an email address from a person within your company instead of having automatic emails with the “No reply” email address.
Furthermore, before we continue further, email marketing requires you to choose the right platforms for your email marketing. Mailchimp is a very popular choice for many companies, however at scale it can become expensive to use in the long run. Therefore, here are cheap Mailchimp substitutes you can consider using for your email marketing newsletters:
- Flodesk
- MailerLite
- Campaign Monitor
- GetResponse
- Mailjet
- Product suggestions
Most online marketplaces, such as Amazon, Fiver, and AliExpress, dominate the market for selling products and services. Every other day, or week, these large companies send out emails to their users to promote their products and services. For instance, if you purchase clothing from AliExpress, you’ll see that AliExpress will send you emails almost every day with new promotions of similar clothing recommendations they have.
This is when you provide a personalized experience for your audience and allows you to categorize your customers based on their interests and behavior. Thus, it will enable you to add more personalized emails to your newsletter and improve your campaign. Here’s an example below of AliExpresse’s promotional emails they send almost daily.
- Segment your audience
No matter how many emails you send out, if you don’t segment them, you won’t succeed. Segmenting your audience improves email engagement. In fact, according to statistics, targeted emails will have anywhere between 20% to 40% higher click-through rates.
For example, if you send promotional emails to an audience that isn’t interested in that niche, you are wasting your time and effort.
- Try to poll your audience
Ask your audience what they want from you? What kind of emails do they want you to send out? Try including a poll in your emails and asking subscribers what type of content they are most interested in. After all, no matter how well you target your audience, their response will still be more important than what you think.
Most subscribers will only be interested in sales and discounts. Others might want to learn more about upcoming products and might want you to send new messages continuously. So, when your subscribers hear what they want, you can achieve higher engagement rates and better opportunities for each email you send.
- Pay attention to your fonts, colors, and images
Whether you believe it or not, the fonts you choose in your newsletter have a tremendous impact on how people perceive it. Moreover, here are a few email newsletter design font tips you can consider following:
- Use web-safe fonts to ensure that your display is consistent across many web browsers and email clients
- Try limiting the number of fonts you are using and keep things more straightforward to increase readability
- Avoid creating newsletters that aren’t well structured and organized
- Use fonts that are part of your brand style guide and present a consistent look and feel of your brand
It’s pretty tricky to balance out your images and copy at the beginning, but once you identify your brand style, you can use it in your email newsletters. However, to keep everything running smoothly, here are a few tips you should follow:
- Don’t use a background image until you really need to
- Make sure your email is well and works without any images
- Include all important information in your CTAs in your images
Nevertheless, images are essential to your emails and help ensure you fully connect your readers with your content. So, you must choose clear images and support the topics you are trying to present.
Above all, colors are also an important part of email newsletter designs since it helps them with brand recognition and can help improve their mood and influence purchase behavior. Try limiting your color choices and use much brighter colors for your CTAs, so you can try to draw the reader’s attention further.
- Keep your email short
Whenever your visitors start to read your email, your goal is to keep them engaged with your content. After all, this is the whole point of an email newsletter. You want them to visit your site after reading your newsletter directly.
If you want to push your users much quicker to your site, your best option is to keep your emails short. Nobody has time to read long emails. According to studies, the ideal length of an email is around 50 to 125 words at the maximum.
However, you want to test your audience’s ideal length. Identify what gets you the highest click-through rates. However, there are still a few tips you can follow:
- Make sure to make your headline persuasive
- Avoid sounding like a sales manager and try to save that for your CTA
- Include content that is informative and entertaining. This won’t only engage users but also encourage them to share your newsletter
Wrapping everything up
That’s about it for this article. These are the seven tips to increase user engagement through email newsletters. Above all, you need to know that most people won’t open your email if your subject line isn’t persuasive enough.
After that, you need to worry about your content. Like we said before, avoid making your content long and keep it anywhere between 50 to 125 words. A few words more shouldn’t be a big deal, but as long as the content is persuasive.
Lastly, don’t forget to include exciting font colors and images. You want your email to look good, not plain and boring!
CUSPERA 