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Before digging deeper into different metrics to boost your engagement rate, let’s take a look at why choosing the right email marketing tool is important for your email campaigns and how it could influence the engagement.
Choosing the right email marketing tool
There are tons of different email marketing tools in the market. Each tool is different in terms of the features it provides.
If you ask me to suggest a tool that would help you focus on list growth and engagement, I’ll recommend you to pick either AWeber or MailChimp. Both are feature-rich and unique, but with different pricings.
For instance, I am really fond of AWeber’s dashboard usability. With just a few clicks, I can track everything from open rates and sales. It also helps me to easily segment my email list so that I can send personalized emails to my list.
On the other hand, MailChimp is not that easy to use. However, it offers way too many sales oriented features which come handy especially if you’re selling your own products on your blog.
So before deciding the right tool for your needs, you’ll need to compare between AWeber vs. MailChimp and choose which one suits the best for your needs.
Let’s take a look at a few ways to improve email engagement rate.
#1. Email subject line
Needless to say, the subject line is a critical element in email marketing. Your email subject line can make or break your email campaigns because it is the first thing your leads will notice when your email hit their inbox.
According to a report, 33% of email recipients open email based solely on subject line.
Now, take a look at a few methods to improve the subject line and thereby increasing the email open rate.
- Best practices: Did you know that certain words can grab your leads’ attention more quickly than others? From various studies, it has been found that email subject lines with following words are more likely to be opened than those without. The words are ‘you’, ‘free’, ‘quick’ and ‘tomorrow.’
- Avoid these words: On the contrary, there are some other words you should avoid in your subject line if you want to increase the open rates. They are “fw:”, ‘newsletter’ and ‘meeting’.
So far we’ve discussed the best practices and the bad practices. Make sure you test different subject lines to see which ones resonate the best with your leads.
#2. Personalize your emails
Email personalization is one of the best ways to enhance the engagement rate of your email newsletters.
Email personalization isn’t limited to adding the lead’s name in the subject line. There are many other practical ways, and some of them are listed below.
Segment your email list: Segmenting your email list helps you classify your list into a distinct group based on various aspects such as form data submission, email responses, on-site behavior, interests of your leads, etc. One of the main benefits of email segmentation is that it helps you send laser-targeted emails to your list, so they are more likely to engage with your emails.
In fact, personalizing emails on the basis of email segmentation is proven to bring in more revenue to your table. A Marketing Sherpa study reveals that email personalization increases the email revenue by 50%.
Always send your leads to a landing page: If you’re looking to generate more revenue from your emails, aside from email personalization it is always better to direct your leads to a landing page that exactly addresses the needs of your leads. For instance, if you’re offering a special discount for your subscribers, make sure you direct your leads to a special page where you offer the discount.
In fact, you don’t need to be a designer in order to create a landing page. If you’re on WordPress, install a landing page plugin and create it easily without having to edit the code.
#3. Lead quality
Not every lead is a quality lead, which means not everyone who subscribes to your email list is going to be your ideal customer. Maybe, they are just poking around and want to see what’s inside your newsletter.
However, make sure you always check the quality of your leads if you truly want to increase the engagement rate.
Below are a few tips that will help you improve the quality of your email list.
Double opt-in: Always ask your leads to confirm the emails they submit. This is one of the must-do tactics to ensure the lead quality
The number of fields: Reducing the number of form fields is one of the common practices to grow an email list. Comparing with a form that has many fields, your subscribers are more likely to sign up to your list if it has only a few form fields because of its convenience.
However, at times reducing the number of fields can sacrifice the quality of the leads especially if you’re in the B2B business. So it is always better to check the quantity vs. quality of your leads while growing your list.
Validate the form fields: Validating the form fields is yet another way to ensure the leads’ quality.
Which one is your favorite way to grow an email list? Share your thoughts with us by dropping a line below.
Image: Notepad and green plant on wooden background with EMAIL LIST word
