Do you suffer from low email engagement? Not sure what that means or if you fall into this category? Start with this question, “How many people are on your email list?”
Is it an impressive number like 20,000? Great!
But then, follow up by answering this question, “What percentage of subscribers, on average, open your emails? What percentage click on the links?”
If these numbers make you a little embarrassed — you may have low engagement. But it’s not something to be embarrassed about at all. In fact, it’s an incredibly-common issue for everyone from small non-profit hobby clubs to behemoth enterprise retailers.
But if you have single-digit open rates and microscopic click-through rates, it is time to take action. Your list is a valuable email marketing asset that needs to be nurtured and protected. Today, we’ll talk about how to overcome low email engagement.
Why low email engagement is a big problem
A disengaged email list becomes problematic when you keep sending out emails that hardly anyone is opening or reading. To the email blocklists and spam filters, you’re beginning to look like a spammer. If the problem continues, they’ll begin filtering your emails into spam folders or even blocking your marketing emails from getting delivered altogether.
This means you’ll not only have low engagement, but also poor email deliverability.
Poor deliverability will take your open rates from bad to abysmal. And, in fact, this may already be happening if you’ve had low email engagement for a while.
The more obvious problem with a disengaged email list is that if no one is opening your emails, you’re not achieving the intended results with your email marketing campaigns. You need your customers and subscribers to regularly engage with your emails. No one is going to open every one of them. But everyone is happier if your open rates can remain — at minimum — in the teens. But over 20-30% is even better.
So, what can you do if you have a disengaged email list?
It seems like a big problem, because you’re trying to get people who are already ignoring you to stop ignoring you — by sending them more of what they’re ignoring.
Fortunately, there are strategies you can use to identify and fix an email list with low engagement.
How to fix low email engagement
If you’re committed to maximizing the impact of your hard-earned email list, you’ll want to improve engagement rates as soon as you notice a problem. It’s a system you should add to your marketing tasks on a semi-regular basis — perhaps annually — to achieve and maintain strong results.
Here are the steps to improve low email engagement rates:
1. Assess your current email marketing habits
Let’s consider a few questions you can use to assess your current email habits.
How often are you sending emails?
Some companies are sending too many emails, and their subscribers have tuned out. Others are sending too few emails, and their subscribers have forgotten about them. Others are very inconsistent.
Do any of these describe your email sending habits?
Which segments of your email list are you focusing on?
Are you just blasting out emails to your entire list every time, or are you attempting to send more targeted and segmented emails to portions of your list, at least some of the time?
If all your emails go to everyone and you have low email engagement, this is a key area you can work on to get some pretty impressive results.
What type of content do you send?
Do you vary the types of content you send out, or is it mostly all the same stuff? If every email you send is about the best deals ever and how time is running out, you’ve trained your subscribers to ignore you.
Are your emails over-designed? Too long? Too short? Again — look at what you’re doing, and
consider alternative approaches to shake things up.
Are you in a subject line rut?
There are many types of subject line strategies. Are you using the same basic approach every time? Look back at the subject lines for the last 100 emails you’ve sent out. See if you’re being too predictable.
2. Send a re-engagement email campaign
Create a segment of all unengaged contacts — subscribers who haven’t opened an email for at least six months. If you have low email engagement, this may be a majority of your subscribers. That’s okay.
With that segment, create a campaign specifically designed to win them back and re-engage them. These are sometimes called winback campaigns.
There are a few ways to run a winback campaign, but here are the main components:
- Use a crystal clear subject line like, “Do you still want to get our emails?”
- Create a desirable offer
- Make it a three-email campaign to make sure most people in this segment see it
- Remove anyone who doesn’t open any of these three emails from your list
Yes, unsubscribe them yourself. This might be painful, but it’s super important. Why? Because by removing inactive subscribers, you’ll improve your open rates automatically, and get off the radar of spam filters. These people are likely never going to re-engage (at least not during this stage of their life) if they don’t respond to this campaign.
The desirable offer could be many things — a discount, a contest, a special opportunity — but it needs to be something you can fit in the subject line. This is another reason to make this a three-email campaign. That way you can use three different attention-getting subject lines that will speak directly to a disengaged subscriber.
It’s their last chance. So give them every reason to respond before you remove them.
3. Alter your content strategy
Whatever you have been doing isn’t working. So stop doing it.
Maybe you’ve been afraid to make direct sales offers, and have been mostly sending out content you think is valuable and useful. That’s good to do. But if that’s all you’ve been doing, maybe most subscribers joined to find deals and they just need to get some straight-up great offers now and then.
To be fair, that’s unlikely to be the problem. Sending valuable content is a great strategy. The more likely scenario is that you’ve overwhelmed your subscribers with lots of sales over time, so they’re becoming numb.
Here are a few content strategy ideas you can try out:
- Introduce more interactive elements like polls and quizzes
- Use more humor, including GIFs and memes, as well as written copy
- Implement a wider, more unpredictable, range of content — sales, educational guides, fun stuff, shareable memes, great stories, etc.
- Speak to the problems and concerns of your customers
Email example from Really Good Emails
The bottom line here is simple — whatever you’ve been doing with your email content, stop doing it and try another approach.
4. Adjust your sending frequency
If you’re sending inconsistently, you need to figure out a way to schedule time to create emails so you can start sending on a regular basis. A great way to do this is to write multiple emails all at once.
For example, suppose you want to send out one email per week. That’s a good frequency. It doesn’t overwhelm your subscribers (or your schedule), but it’s enough to stay on their minds and relevant in their lives. Write all four emails for the month in one day, and then schedule them to go out once per week. This is much easier for you than sitting down every week and having to come up with an email. This will also improve your writing quality because you’ll get in more of a rhythm.
If you’re sending too many emails, figure out a slower pace, and decide what you’re doing too often so you can reduce that type of content.
5. Alter your subject line approach
Another cause of low open rates is that your subject lines just aren’t attracting enough attention. Maybe they’re too bland. Maybe they’re too extreme and everyone is numb to it. Maybe you’re putting their first name in every single subject line and it’s gotten old.
Just like with your email content, you can’t use any single subject line strategy for every email, because your subscribers will get bored and start feeling like they don’t need to open it.
So, vary your approach. Here are a few proven strategies to use:
- Curiosity. You won’t believe what this cat did
- Urgency. Respond by Friday the 11th to keep getting our emails
- Humor. Forget about us? It’s okay, we forgot about you too
- Direct. Check out these brand new products
- Personalized. For parents — something to do after the kids are in bed
- Personality. Make this your own way of speaking
Again, if you use any of these exclusively, it gets old. Use all of them. Use emojis. Write something abnormal. Use all caps for one word now and then. Put their first name in there. Try all sorts of things. But don’t do anything every time.
5. Start segmenting to increase relevance
Segmentation is powerful. Every business has categories of products, or various service options, or different subscription tiers, or customers who have been there for vastly different amounts of time, or demographic data on your subscribers. You have some way to segment your subscribers.
The simplest way to segment is by engagement level. You can create segments based on who has opened and clicked more emails.
The next simplest is demographics, like the example above “for parents.” If you have data like this on your subscribers, you could send that email just to the parents on your email list. Then, it’s only being seen by people for whom it’s relevant. And, perhaps more importantly, people who aren’t parents won’t see messages that don’t mean anything to them. This combination results in higher open rates.
Send stuff only to college students or only to people over 55 years old, or only to people who own their homes. Whatever information you have about your subscribers, you can create segments for those, and then send more targeted messages that’s designed only for them.
6. Create a video
This is a great item to put in your re-engagement campaign. Why? Because videos increase engagement.
Create a video expressing that you’re changing some things in your business, and you’d love to see everyone get excited about it and start participating with your marketing emails again. Or create a video for a new product, or to advertise whatever offer you’re putting in the campaign.
Whatever you do — get the word “video” in the subject line, because that will get more people to open it.
7. Make sure your tech is working
If you’re going to re-activate dormant subscribers, the absolute worst thing would be for them to try to re-engage, and then the button doesn’t work, or the poll doesn’t work, or the coupon code doesn’t work on the checkout page.
Be absolutely certain that whatever links and website assets you’re using as part of your campaign are working correctly. Preview your emails, click all the links, fill out your own forms, and make sure everything functions as it should.
8. Make CTA buttons clear and compelling
If you get even a fair number of your dormant subscribers to re-engage, you have done a mighty deed.
You’ll have a much better chance of making this happen if you write excellent button copy for your call to action. This isn’t the place for bland and generic stuff like “learn more” and “buy now.”
Email example from Really Good Emails
No. You want something more like this:
- Grab your 25% off coupon today!
- Yes! I want in!
- Gimme my discount
- Take the quiz and see your results
Be specific with your call to action, based on whatever your email is offering.
10. Attract new email subscribers
Really, this is what it may come down to. If you have an email list with 20,000 subscribers, but your open rates are consistently around 5%, that means only a few thousand of those people are regularly engaging with your emails.
So if you run a successful winback campaign, you may still end up having to delete half your email list if large numbers of them don’t respond. And that could happen. If your marketing emails are already going to the spam folders for many of those subscribers, they may not see any of these re-engagement emails. They’re done. It doesn’t serve you to keep them on your list because it draws away resources and dilutes your data about what’s working well for those who are still engaged.
What you can always do is attract new subscribers. And if you use the strategies from this article, you’ll be much more likely to keep those new subscribers engaged and interested, and looking forward to hearing from you.
Cutting inactive subscribers and adding new ones is the fastest way to dramatically increase your open rates.
Learn more: How MailPoet can help you manage your inactive subscribers