Sending safe content to permission-based lists over clean IPs and staying complaint-free is not going to secure your email’s place in the inbox any longer.
ISPs are beginning to factor more engagement metrics into their inbox deliverability, making opens and clicks more important than ever. This means, in general, that marketers need to step up their game by:
- improving subject lines through testing
- optimizing preview panes and calls-to-action
- producing and sending compelling offers in a targeted, timely manner
- and creating dialogue through polls, contests, review requests and more.
Social platforms have offered exciting opportunities for marketers to create more engagement with email as we’ve witnessed this holiday season, through:
- special offers only mentioned on those sites (but linked via email) -
Example: National Aquarium of Baltimore - exciting contests – Example: Sephora
- and basic themed conversation-starters/story-sharing prompts -
Example: Burt’s Bee’s
All of these tactics help to create new social followers (11% Facebook fan growth for the National Aquarium for that email!), build relationships, help marketers to learn more about their audience AND set up messages to garner more clicks.
And don’t forget, equally important to getting the clicks, you’ve got to know when to cut bait. Marketers can no longer continue to send messages to largely inactive lists over and over. Re-engagement campaigns will be critical in 2010 and eventual suppression of perpetual non-responders seems imminent.
As the new year arrives, how will you prioritize improving engagement?
Kristen Gregory
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto
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