5 Incredible Ways to Build a Highly Engaged Email List
Some marketers can get too excited growing their database, thinking that successful email marketing lies in having a huge email list. Meanwhile, there are those who think quality over quantity. They would rather have a relatively small but highly engaged email list. These marketers are the smartest because they know that the percentage of engaged subscribers is more important than the number of contacts in your database when it comes to reaping profits.
Determining True Engagement
Different industries have different average email engagement rates. The best way to set a benchmark for your business is by monitoring engagement metrics and take the average of each to know how each email compares with others.
What are these metrics? There are two set of metrics that you must review to determine true engagement. First are the positive engagement metrics, which are open rate, clickthrough rate, and response rate. These metrics indicate that recipients took your desired actions. Negative engagement metrics show that recipients are doing the things that you least expect them to do like unsubscribing, deleting your email or marking it as spam.
How to Build a Highly Engaged Email List
When building your email list, you should know first about the importance of permission-based email marketing to ensure better engagement. From there, follow these tips on how to grow an email list of engaged subscribers.
1. Put sign-up forms all over your website
Insert sign-up forms in various parts of your website to capture the contact information of visitors. The mere fact that they entrusted their email address and other personal information with you means that they will be more likely engaged when delivered with relevant emails.
You can place a sign-up form on the sidebar for those interested in receiving your weekly round-ups. Some businesses add a pop-up banner that appears each time a visitor, who has remained for a certain amount of time on a page, is about to leave the site. Place a notification bar on top or at the bottom of your page where they can subscribe to your offer. Your chance of getting your visitors’ email addresses should not be limited to your Contact Us page only.
2. Segment your contacts
Sending the right message to recipients is crucial to gain better engagement, and proper segmentation lets you do this. You can segment your contacts based on company size, industry, or location. Use the buyer’s journey to guide your segmentation. Determine who among your contacts are in the awareness, consideration, decision or loyalty stage to send targeted emails.
Online behavior can be a basis of your segmentation. You can group contacts based on their opens, clicks or pageviews. Pay attention to their purchasing behavior to know which products interest them or which product page do they frequent.
3. Personalize your email
Connect with your recipients on a more personal level through personalized email. Personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates. Of course, you don’t want to look creepy, so try to limit your personalization to two or three times in your email.
You can start by using their first names in subject lines, as personalized subject lines can deliver up to 26% higher unique open rates overall. You can go beyond that by sending personalized emails based on gender, location, or buying behavior. You can send different emails to male and female recipients or offer different products based on the weather in your customers’ location. Or, know the recent purchases of your contacts and then send upselling or cross-selling email to encourage repeat business.
4. Offer relevant content
Publish valuable content on your blog regularly to attract prospects. Your content must provide solutions to the problems and challenges of your target audience to ensure relevancy. Give rich insights to establish your authority in your niche.
Make your sign-up forms visible to readers to encourage subscriptions, and be sure to promote your content on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media channels. It’s much better if you can engage in social media groups where your prospects are part of when promoting your blog.
5. Utilize social media following
Your social media presence must have gained you a decent number of following, which you can convert into email subscribers. Get your community to sign-up on your email list for offers such as content or discounts. Incentivize if needed. You can also set the CTA button on your Facebook page into Sign Up.
Growing a highly engaged email list can be challenging, but with excellent marketing automation software, the task will be easy. As you take these tips on how to engage email subscribers, be sure to use an email marketing software that has advanced features to help you create highly engaging emails.
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