How to Make Your Emails More Engaging

It’s not enough to get email subscribers. To succeed with email marketing today, you need actively engaged subscribers.

You’ve heard the phrase: the “1,000 true fans.”

These are the people who love everything about your brand. Who are happy to buy the product or services you offer and come back again and again.

The true fans are who you want to create.

And you can do that by making your emails more engaging. Engaged readers can get created, and we’re going to show you how to do it with your emails.

1. Have a plan

Before you sit down and start writing, it’s essential to have an actual idea of where you’re going. Great email marketers and brands that have legions of excited fans use their emails to as a roadmap for a customer journey.

Think about that as you start. Look at where your customers and readers are right now and know where you want them to go. Then, create a path for them through your emails that will help push them along the way.

Storytelling is a great way to do that. Tell your readers a story about your brand and products. You can also include their stories in the form of testimonials and case studies. And don’t forget to make them part of the story too, you bet that will catch their attention.

2. Drive curiosity

We love curiosity! It’s an incredible psychological trigger that is perfect for getting engagement in your email marketing. We consider curiosity, and it’s cousin fear of missing out (FOMO) to be core components of the success behind reveal marketing.

Ok so how do you do that?

Start with the email subject. What’s a subject line that would make your readers have to open your emails? Brainstorm and test them out.

From there, think of the body of your email.

Here’s where interactive content can put you a step ahead. Interactive content compels users to take action. They can’t passively watch if they want to scratch that curiosity itch. Your readers have to click or spin or scratch the content they see.

This is one reason why you see growth in kinetic emails. These emails rely on the power of touch and the more people touch, the more engaged they become.

See where we’re going with this?

3. Think about the clicks

The goal is to have a compelling message that gets your email readers to click, right?

Unfortunately, a lot of the time that the end goal gets lost in the shuffle. We get it; you have to worry about design and copy and making sure everything is spelled correctly so thinking about how click-through buttons look and where to place them can get set on the back burner.

This is where you should pause and add a click through strategy to your next email planning session.

Get clear on not only what you want people to do in your email but also where you’re going to tell them to do it. That can include using a nice big button that calls for a click or a few text links or both, make sure readers know precisely what to do and where to click to do it in every single email.

4. Ask for feedback (the fun way)

Getting feedback from your customers and readers is essential for success. But the standard old text email that says, “hey let us know how we can improve.” doesn’t get as much traction as it used to.

And for this, we can turn to the fun stuff.

Using interactive polls and surveys can serve a ton of useful purposes:

• You can get solid data points from your customers that you can use and apply to future campaigns
• It shows your customers that you care about their opinions (customer brownie points are always a good thing)
• You get your readers accustomed to clicking in your emails and the more they click now, the more likely they are to click later so you’re planting the seed now

All of these are important for their reasons, but together, they can offer a power-packed punch of great information that benefits both you and your readers.

5. Personalize

There’s no doubt you’ve heard marketers yelling about personalizing emails the last few years. Of course, there’s a reason for that, it works!

It’s not just about including your reader’s name in the email or subject line or sending the email from your email address or all the other tips you see around — it has to go deeper than that.

So let’s look at what you can do on a couple of levels.

First, change your mindset. Your email list is more than just a ‘list’ it’s a collection of real live people, so when you write your emails focus as if you were writing to a real person, not a group of data points.

Taking a little bit of a less corporate and more personal approach from your end can go a long way to start building a level of trust with your readers.

Also, think about how you can segment your email list too. Breaking one big list into smaller chunks of people who are all interested in one thing gives you the ability to get much more granular and personal with your emails.

That helps people feel like the emails they are getting are pretty much always related to their interests and likes. And who doesn’t like that?

Now, make it happen

You’ve got five strategies to dive into to make your emails more engaged. Now, it’s up to you, dig in and make things happen!