Email Marketing Tips to Increase Your User Engagement

Every website has a purpose. Whether your site is for a family-owned bakery, a woodworking shop, or even a personal blog, it can benefit from attracting repeat visitors and increasing user engagement.

Partaking in email marketing initiatives (sending electronic messages to site visitors via email) is one of the best ways to do this, as there will be more than 3.8 billion email users before the start of 2019, according to a 2018 Radicati Group study. Imagine how many people you might be able to build relationships with through email outreach!

In this post, we’ll review why email marketing is important, how you can get started, and share some email marketing tips to help you build and maintain an audience while executing your marketing goals.

Why you should practice email marketing

Emails are like opinions: everybody has (at least) one! That may not be 100 percent true, but most active online users do have email addresses, according to the same Radicati Group study. Can you think of a single website with user accounts that doesn’t require an email address to sign up?

Email is one of the only marketing platforms in which you can feel confident that your message is received by the end user (assuming it doesn’t end up in a spam box). With social media marketing, for example, you can never really guarantee that your message is even seen by a specific user.

A study from Locowise discovered that Facebook posts shared by pages that had fewer than 1,000 likes were only seen by 14 percent of users. In contrast, a study conducted by Sign-Up.To revealed that an average of 25 percent of emails delivered through a marketing campaign were opened by end users.

Another benefit of email marketing is that when you run campaigns, you’re able to target specific subsets of users. Depending on how you’ve segmented your mailing lists (maybe you categorize audience members by age or location), you can tailor your messages in a way that can increase click-throughs and encourage even more engagement, as it resonates with readers on more personal levels. For example, a teenager would be more likely to open an email about college preparation courses than someone who is retired and living in Florida.

Beyond the statistics, you also have the benefit of increasing your brand awareness. Once you collect a user’s email address, every time you send them a message, you’re reminding them of who you are and what you do.

3 tips to increase user engagement

Once your email subscription tools are set up and you add contacts to your mailing list, it’s time to begin marketing your brand. Here are three tried and true email marketing tips:

1. Consistency is key

You don’t want your site visitors to sign up for updates and then never receive them. Even worse, you don’t want them to receive an update from you out of the blue. They might not remember who you are, or how they subscribed to your emails in the first place.

Make sure that you have a regular emailing schedule. Don’t worry about sending daily emails, just be sure to deliver consistent and regular emails so that subscribers know exactly when they can expect to hear from you.

2. Keep your emails clear and concise

If a reader receives an email from you and it’s just a giant block of text, they may not take the time to read the entire thing. Time is valuable, and if a reader is asked to open and read your email, do your best to ensure that it can be easily scanned and that the messaging is clear. Otherwise, the users who you encouraged to sign up for your correspondences can end up frustrated and might even unsubscribe.

3. Care about your users

This may seem obvious, but it’s so important that it has to be emphasized. Don’t overwhelm your users with too many messages. The point isn’t to remind them that you exist, or to constantly encourage purchases from your online store.

Take the time to fully strategize about the quality content that you can offer, and be sure that it’s content your readers want to receive.

Setting up email marketing with your WordPress site

Email marketing is a vetted approach for increasing user engagement, leads, and sales. So, how do you actually begin building your list of email addresses and engaging with your readers?

There are two key aspects of email marketing: building an email list and actually sending emails to your subscribers. Luckily, Jetpack can help with both!

If you’re using MailChimp to build out your marketing list and campaigns, you can make it easier for people to subscribe with Jetpack’s MailChimp subscriber popup widget. This widget will prompt users to share their email addresses when they visit your site so that you can communicate with them through MailChimp. Once they subscribe, you can use MailChimp to execute almost any email marketing strategy you want!

Another powerful email marketing feature that Jetpack offers is Jetpack Subscriptions. This allows you to set up automated emails to notify your site subscribers of any new posts that you publish. This is a great way to increase engagement for new posts while reminding your subscribers that you’re publishing quality content that can benefit them.

There are many customization options available within Jetpack Subscriptions. You can change the title and message that users see on the signup form, as well as the kind of notifications they’ll receive, like a summary of a post or its full text.

Jetpack can help you reach your email marketing goals

We’ve discussed some of the why’s and how’s surrounding email marketing. More specifically, we reviewed how email marketing is a dependable approach, and how Jetpack can help you achieve your email marketing goals.

Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. Don’t use your email lists to clutter the inboxes of your users just to drive more sales. You want to present users with quality content, and you should have a valid reason to be communicating with them (like sharing a new blog post or informing them of an upcoming sale).

Do you have any additional tips to share? Let us know about your experiences with email marketing in the comments section below!

Zach Wills

Focused on providing top-notch development services to our clients @ Codivated.