The digital marketing domain is buzzing with popular techniques like SEO, advertising, and social media marketing. But the importance and usefulness of email marketing have still prevailed through the years. Even today, emails and newsletters serve as one of the most effective means to establish a direct connection with customers at an individual level.
The first step of email marketing, quite obviously, is to build a list of customers, and subscribers. But in today’s world, time and attention are just as valuable as money. So if your newsletters are not engaging enough for your audience, then they will lose interest in your products or services.
And that is why today, we'll be giving you 5 effective tips that will help you increase the audience engagement on your newsletters.
5 Tips to Make Your Newsletters Highly Engaging for Your Audience
Get Feedback from Inactive Customers
It’s impossible to keep every one of your subscribers interested and engaged, so you’ll probably have many inactive subscribers in your email list. If you want to increase audience engagement in the future, then you need to what made your inactive subscribers lose interest.
So our first tip is quite simple – collect feedback from customers who have stopped interacting with your newsletters. Ask them why they lost interest. If there was something they didn’t like, and what they can do to improve.
However, keep in mind that these are uninterested subscribers, and there’s a good chance that they may even ignore your feedback mail. Then how do you make sure that your feedback mail gets a response from them? Here are some ways to do it:
- The subject of your mail should make it clear that you want the customer’s feedback.
- Your email copy should be short, polite yet professional, and straight to the point.
- Add in words that express how valuable their opinions are, and that they can help you improve your services.
- Add in a few sentences to express how you appreciate them for taking time to send feedback, and that their voices matter to you.
- In the end, also tell them that you’d love to have them back on board.
You can even throw in a personalized offer in your feedback mail, to give the customers some motivation or incentive to come back.
Feedback emails will not just help you to collect audience opinion on what went wrong, but may even draw the attention of audiences who lost interest. And most importantly, it will show them that you care for your customers and not just for profits.
Segment your email list
Customer segmentation is a term that is frequently heard in the digital marketing domain. There are many benefits of segmenting your customers based on their preferences or other demographic factors such as age, gender, location, etc. And one such benefit is that it helps to increase audience engagement.
Customers don't like to receive lots of irrelevant emails and newsletters. You want to target the right content towards the right audience. And customer segmentation is one of the most effective methods of doing it. When you categorize your email list, you can group customers with similar interests and behavior.
Once you have segmented your audience, you'll get a good idea about the type of content that attracts each group. Then you can carefully draft your newsletters based on the audience's preferences. When customers get the most relevant content in their inbox, they are more likely to respond or interact.
Create Quality Content
A lot of people who seek marketing advice get annoyed when they hear something as clichéd as 'Quality Content'. And yet, it was a highly successful and influential person – Bill Gates – who popularized the phrase 'Content is King.’
Yes, even today, this phrase holds just as much weight as it did in the past. All your marketing efforts and strategies will go down the drains if your content isn’t good enough. Here are some points that will help you create quality content for your newsletters:
- Don’t stretch your words. Your newsletters should drive home the main point of the email at the beginning itself. The subject and first few lines of the mail should clearly tell the audience what it’s about.
- Create content that has a voice. It means that your newsletters should have a conversational tone and shouldn’t be monotonous or generic.
- Your newsletters must be useful to the readers. Whether you are trying to sell something or simply sharing information, it should benefit the audience. Also, don’t forget to provide your subscribers with an option through which they can share the content on social media.
If you are dealing with a large number of customers and subscribers, consider hiring professional copywriters who are experienced in creating quality content for newsletters.
Make Your Emails Visually Appealing
Bland is boring, and you don’t want your readers to feel bored. People are busy these days, and they usually skim through the information that they don’t find useful. If your newsletter fails to capture the readers’ attention instantly, then it will fail to create any engagement. With a visually appealing email draft, you can immediately grasp the readers’ attention.
There are plenty of tools, templates, and software that are designed to integrate engaging graphical elements to your emails. Understand color combinations and how they influence your readers’ mindset.
Add in some animations and images that are relevant to the content of your mail. Highlight important links, call-to-action buttons, and other important texts in the mail so that even those who don’t read the entire mail can still get the main point. If you want to create a positive first impression, then make sure that your newsletters are visually appealing.
Craft Personalized Newsletters
Customers love to receive personalized emails; it shows them that you’ve taken the time to understand their needs. More importantly, personalized emails are a way to tell your audience that you appreciate them individually.
A common mistake that many businesses make is that they focus more on what they want to say, and not what the readers want to hear. If your newsletters sound like a sales pitch, then that’s a red flag for your business.
Here are some things you can do to create reader-oriented newsletters.
- Build a two-way communication channel. Let the audience share their voices too. A great example is to start a newsletter campaign that asks audiences to share their experiences with your product or service. Then you can even share these stories with other readers in future newsletters.
- Study your audience. How can you create emails focused on your audience if you don’t know what they want? Don’t be too engaged in promoting your own services. Spend a considerable time studying your customers' behavior and know them better at an individual level.
There’s no rocket science behind the fact that readers love to engage with content that makes them feel appreciated at a personal level.
Conclusion
Newsletters are a versatile marketing tool. They can provide information, enlighten readers about your business, and boost sales by increasing conversion rates. But customer preferences and trending topics are constantly changing, so it can be very difficult to craft engaging newsletters.
Give a fresh perspective to your email campaigns, and make the best use of the above-mentioned tips in your newsletters with the help of Mailpro. We guarantee that you will be pleased with the results.