Tips and tricks to increase email engagement rates

If you're a marketer and you often ask yourself, "How can I increase my email engagement rate?" then you're in the right place.

The email inbox is an unforgiving terrain. Who you are or where you come from doesn't matter; you can survive only on your own merit. In order to win—i.e., to ensure your audience continues showing interest in your emails and engagingwith you—you have to sharpen your skills and bring your A-game to the field.

In this blog, we'll take you through some tips and tricks across different areas of email marketing to help you boost your email engagement. 

Always use double opt-in

When people sign up to receive emails from you, send a confirmation email and have them opt in again. This practice is known as double opt-in. When you get this confirmation from subscribers that they indeed choose to receive your emails, you know they're invested, and you lower your risk of losing engagement. It also helps you weed out fake emails and ensure you have high-quality leads to engage with. 

Send awesome welcome emails

When people subscribe to your emails, it's not always the case that they know you. So welcome emails can be a great way to introduce yourself to your customers. A compelling introduction can help you set expectations and build excitement for the upcoming emails you're going to send. 

For instance, you can talk about your history, the driving force behind your company's existence, and what value you'll deliver. For your new audience, this welcome email will set the tone for an exciting journey with you.

Set the right tone

Even if you're a business, it's crucial to maintain a personal tone. Emails written in a fun, casual tone get way more engagement than ones that sound like they were written by a robot. After all, email is a highly personal medium, and even if it's a one-to-many communication, it has to read like one-to-one to engage your audience. You'll always have other forms of content like reports, ebooks, and whitepapers, where you should maintain a more formal tone, but email doesn't have to be one of them.

Send emails that come from a person

Sending your emails from a person works better than sending them from an account like noreply@xyz.com or hello@zylker.com. While such email addresses are good for transactional emails, when you're expecting engagement from an email, it's always better to humanize it and send it from a person.

Conduct engagement outreach

Check in on your audience if they haven't engaged with your emails in a long time. Confirm whether they're still interested in receiving your emails. Remind them why they signed up in the first place and offer to let them resubscribe if they'd still like to receive emails from you. This is a good way to start re-engagement campaigns and boost your engagement rates.

Write great subject lines

Subject lines help people decide whether an email is worth reading or not. So if you want those sweet engagement numbers, then get your readers to open the emails you send. Great subject lines create a sense of urgency or pique curiosity and are crisp, highly personalized, and, most importantly, fun.

Now this is an intriguing subject line, don't you agree? 

Optimize for devices

In a world where work and personal life spill over each other all the time, emails have taken up prominent space in people's mobile devices and tablets. So it's important that your emails are optimized for different devices and that theylook good for every reader—regardless of the device they use.

Engage visually

Text-only emails are boring. They indicate a lack of effort, and users can quickly lose interest in a block of text. Videos and GIFs are undoubtedly more popular, so why not incorporate them in your emails? Elements such as images, infographics, GIFs, and videos enhance emails and help you present the same content with some welcome visual appeal.

Here's a screen cap of a really fun GIF I received in an email from Really Good Emails.

Create interactive emails

Interactive email elements like quizzes never go out of fashion. As a plus, you can use them to conduct surveys and opinion polls to gauge the effectiveness of your business strategy. For instance, a fashion brand can ask its audience what style they'd like to see for the upcoming season.

Take a look at this poll from a newsletter called either/view that gives its audience both sides of news stories. Accordingly, they run a poll every week on feature stories and present the results in Saturday's newsletter. 

Personalize the content 

Let's be honest. If your name was Patricia, which of the following email subject lines would be more likely to make you engage?

"Hey there! We don't want you to miss out" or

"Patricia! We don't want you to miss out"

Most customers like it if a brand goes the extra mile, gets to know them, and sends them emails that are curated to their preferences. Personalization goes beyond calling customers by their name, and a tool like Zoho Campaigns lets you take personalization to the next level with dynamic content. 

Set clear expectations

You can't just send some information in an email and expect the readers to read your mind on what you want them to do about it. If you want them to shop, include a prominent CTA button. If you want them to complete a purchase from an abandoned cart, show them how to do it.

If you want your readers to spread some love for your brand, ask them to share your emails with their friends. For every action you expect the readers to make, offer attractive incentives like discount codes, free premium memberships, loyalty points, and bonus products. 

Make your CTAs pop! 

If you want your users to actually click on your CTAs, then don't make dull ones that merge with the rest of the email content. Make sure your that CTA button is well-designed, that the text inside the button is readable, and that the copy is persuasive. 

Now which one of these CTAs would you click on?

Click here

Start shopping now on clearance sale items

Check out this sale!

Encourage social sharing

Social sharing buttons are a great way to take your emails to a new audience. If you want your subscribers to share your newsletter with their friends and social circles, ask that of your audience in as many words. Don't forget to add buttons to make sharing across different platforms easier.

Segment your email lists 

How can we talk about increasing email engagement and not mention segmentation? Segmentation helps you categorize your contacts into smaller groups and send highly targeted emails relevant to those groups. 

Let's say you're selling CRM software. Multiple stakeholders are involved in the process at varying stages. If you have a steady pipeline with multiple leads from different companies, you might want to group similar titles into the same bucket. You can send case studies, videos, and other content that's highly relevant to each of those segments, increasing your engagement (and your chances of conversion).

Find your ideal frequency

Sending the right number of emails is an art in itself. Send too many, and even your most engaged reader ignores your mails—or worse, unsubscribes. Send too few, and you risk being forgotten.

Full disclosure: There is no magic number of emails you can send for optimal engagement, and you have to experiment to find the sweet spot that works for you (and your subscribers).

Send at the right time

As with frequency, timing also really matters for emails (though doesn't it matter for everything in life?). Depending on your industry and the demographics of your audience, different timings work well to increase email engagement rates. A young adult might be more active at night, and a lifestyle brand might be better off sharing emails closer to the end of the day, whereas if your target audience is mostly retired, then you might want to send emails in the morning when they're likely most active. 

It's also important to note when your emails get the best engagement rates and optimize your send time accordingly. (Psst! Zoho Campaigns has a built-in send time optimization feature, so you don't have to struggle with these calculations.)

A/B testing

You can read any number of blogs and research reports to learn how to increase engagement, but you won't know what works until you test it. Testing your emails helps you understand which subject lines get more opens, which CTAs get clicks, and what type of content your audience finds the most engaging. Audience preferences also keep evolving, and testing helps you keep up with changing tastes to ensure you always get the best possible engagement for your emails. 

Looking to increase your email engagement rates?

Zoho Campaigns is an email marketing software platform with a lot of powerful features that help you reach, engage, and grow your audience effectively.

Try Zoho Campaigns