Your email results are in. Now what?

Part one of four to building an effective engagement strategy

Sometimes after you’ve worked so hard building your campaign’s content, it feels as if your work should be done. You created, proofed, tested and sent your email. So what more could there be? Well, analyzing the response data from your send-off is an important piece of your marketing strategy. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to explore the what, why and how of following up after your results come in. Reaching out to your least and most engaged audience members is an important first step.

You’re getting engaged! Or, um, they are.

What: When we talk about engagement, we’re not talking about you single folks looking for marriage. We’re talking about attracting and holding the attention of your audience. We’re talking about utilizing loyalty programs, triggers, content and social media to get your subscribers involved in your cause. After all, you’re hoping for more than just a ring opens, aren’t you?

Why: Analyzing audience engagement allows you to make decisions to target particular segments of your audience. Your least engaged recipients are the members rarely opening your campaigns. Have you done an Emma search to find those members lately? You can start by asking those recipients to update their information by clicking the manage preferences link at the bottom of your email. If you have subscribers that aren’t clicking, let alone rarely opening, allowing them this opportunity — to change the email address where they’re receiving mail — gives you a fresh chance to get your campaigns back in front of them.

You may also consider surveying these folks. The survey tool enables you to learn more about your audience’s preferences, what topics they care about and how often they’d like to hear from you.

But it’s also a good idea to make sure you aren’t giving all of the oil to the squeaky, least engaged wheels, er, recipients. Your active readers deserve some attention too. Have you thought about creating a loyalty program? MarketingProfs recently presented a study showing that loyalty mailings boost email open and click rates:

• Open rates for mailings sent to loyalty program members were a whopping 40% higher than bulk mailings that were sent to the same clients: 27.4% vs. 19.6%.
• Click rates for the loyalty mailings were 22% higher: 4.0% vs. 3.2%.

If you’re thinking that loyalty programs don’t quite fit your organization, you can achieve similar results by sending targeted campaigns based on website or email analytics. Targeting audience members that show an interest in a specific event or feature gives those members further reason to open an email from you. You’re offering something personal and informative about a topic they’ve expressed interest in. Seems like a no-brainer, right?

Marketing Sherpa reports that specific, analytic-driven campaigns like these bring in impressive response rates:

• The open rate for the targeted campaign in their study was 48%.
• The unique click rate was 43%.

These numbers are well above the Email Stat Center’s industry average open rate of 22.5% open and click-through of 5%.

How: After thinking about what engagement really is and why following up with your most and least engaged members is a good idea, you may be wondering how to get started. First, make your content clickable. When you provide links in your campaign, you’ll be able to track which audience members are actively participating. And Emma allows you to target these engaged, active subscribers in an easy, automated way: Set up triggers emails based on click-through behavior. If you provided a link for members to learn more about an event, set up a targeted trigger campaign that provides more detailed event info.

Additionally, give your members the option to share your campaign with our Social Sharing feature. Enabling the share option puts your content in front of a brand new pool of people — and even potential subscribers.

Between purposefully targeting and speaking to your most and least engaged audience members, you’ll be on track to a long and happy engagement. Congratulations!

Be sure to join me for the next part of this series, which will cover how to manage bounces and non-opens.