About Subscriber Engagement

Engaged subscribers are essential for successful email marketing. Depending on your goals, engagement may be measured by email opens and clicks, social media shares, website visits, or product purchases. Monitor your engagement metrics to see how well your emails meet your goals, and make changes to get the best results.

In this article, you'll learn about subscriber engagement.

Positive engagement

A subscribed contact who is positively engaged is someone who opens and clicks your emails, or interacts with your brand online. Engaged subscribers are likely to open your emails and continue to purchase, donate, or support your organization or brand.

Email opens and clicks don't tell the whole story, though, because they don't indicate what's going on outside of your subscribers' inboxes. To measure subscriber engagement, you should also consider subscribers' purchase activity, website visits, website visit duration, and social media shares.

That said, here are a few ways to increase positive engagement with your emails.

• Test your content, subject line, and send times.
  Use A/B testing to find out what content leads to the best open and click rates, or the highest sales.

• Send tailored emails.
  When you send to segments in your audience, subscribers receive the content they're most interested in. Send emails to subscribers based on their open and click behavior, subscriber profile preferences, and e-commerce purchases, among other variables. If you use tags to organize your audience, send directly to your tagged contacts or create segments based on tag data in your audience.

• Give subscribers choices whenever you can.
  Add a simple poll to an email to find out what your subscribers want to see more of, then use the poll results to build subscriber segments for more specific emails.
• Re-engage your inactive subscribers.
  Send a compelling re-engagement email to subscribers who haven't opened your emails in a while. Ask what content or products they prefer, to help win their interest back.

• Find the right sending frequency.
  Every audience is different, so experiment and test to see what works best for your subscribers. Send more or fewer emails than you usually do, then monitor email reports to see how sending frequency affects opens and clicks.

• Reward your subscribers.
  Send your loyal subscribers coupons, promotions, or online giveaways as an incentive to keep reading.

Negative engagement

When a subscriber unsubscribes, marks your email as spam, or makes a direct complaint, they are negatively engaged. Unfortunately, these people are no longer interested in your email marketing.

Negative engagement can have several causes: Subscribers don't find content compelling or relevant, they don't recognize the brand represented in your emails, or they don't remember signing up for your emails.

Very high rates of negative engagement can cause internet service providers (ISPs) to block your emails from subscriber inboxes. To ensure the successful delivery of your future emails, be sure to keep an eye on these metrics.

Here are a few ways to prevent negative engagement.

• Find out what your subscribers like.
  Send a simple poll to subscribers to see how many and what type of emails they prefer, then target subscribers by their preferences.
• Let your subscribers control how frequently they receive emails.
  Create groups in your audience based on send frequency, like monthly, weekly, and daily subscribers. Then, ask your subscribers to update their contact profiles to change their preferences.
• Make sure content is engaging and relevant.
  Use data in your audience to create segments of subscribers according to their interests or purchase history. Then, send tailored content that's relevant to each segment.
• Refresh your permission reminder.
  Write a clear permission reminder to help your subscribers remember where and why they signed up to receive email marketing from you.
• Polish your emails.
  Design and personalize your emails to feel less generic email and more like a conversation.
• Preview and test.
  Proofread and test your emails thoroughly to make sure everything looks professional and fits your brand and style.
• Manage subscribers who don't engage with your emails.
  Learn how to handle inactive and stale addresses.