In part one of our email check-in I shared some thoughts on the value of reviewing your performance data with a wider time lens as you look for opportunities to drive even greater ROI. I also shared the need to focus on real engagement (clicks, conversion) to watch for signs of shifting behavior from your subscribers/customers.
In today’s post, let’s look more closely at key challenges affecting engagement in the present email landscape, and how to optimize your email marketing to maintain strong delivery to the inbox.
While shifting interests among your audience is certainly one challenge to engagement (no one likes an unsubscribe) there are other areas that require your attention.
Challenges to Engagement – Industry Changes
Tighter Enforcement of Thresholds
Gmail, Yahoo and most recently Microsoft, are taking a firm stance on thresholds for spam complaints (0.3%). Even the best of senders can make an error causing unintentional spam complaints, but should that happen you’ll find more time is required to resolve the issue to get your sending back on track.
The section on best practice challenges later in this post has some helpful advice on how to stay on the right side of this metric.
The One-click Unsubscribe
Inbox providers now require that the unsubscribe experience be made as easy as possible. Commonly known as a “one-click” unsubscribe, and often showing up in the header of the email as per the example below, email recipients now have a way to unsubscribe before they’ve even looked at the content of your email.
This is where highly creative and engaging subject lines and preheader text can encourage readers to engage with your email instead of taking this early opportunity to unsubscribe. If you get stuck for ideas, many ESPs now offer AI tools to provide options. There are also plenty of online tools for generating subject lines and other text, so you shouldn’t be at a loss for inspiration.
Engagement Signals (or lack of)
While there is no threshold or metric being explicitly tracked, the inbox providers are watching engagement more closely and over a longer time period. Yes, they still look at open rates, but they are focusing more on click-throughs, which are a much stronger signal of engagement. The quieter your recipients are, the more likely your email is to be redirected to the spam folder.
AI can play a role in helping you come up with fresh content, new layouts, almost anything you might need for inspiration, but combining those with tried-and-true email best practices is where real engagement begins. Which leads us right into…
Challenges to Engagement – Inconsistent Application of Best Practices
Whether it’s time constraints, lack of resources, insufficient budget, or some combination of all three, we can fall behind on some very important components of a healthy email marketing program.
Aged Email Lists/List Attrition
I’m sure you’ve heard this stat before, but between 20% and 25% of email addresses become invalid annually, meaning having a portion of your current audience just vanish is a constant risk.
If you aren’t in the habit of using an email validation tool or service to clean your list periodically (quarterly is good), you run the risk of having a higher number of hard bounces which can impact your sender reputation. This is a fairly inexpensive solution that doesn’t take a lot of time.
There are other risks that come with an aging email list, especially if you’re not continuously replacing the unsubscribes and invalid email addresses with new signups.
- List attrition, or a shrinking audience. You may find over time that you have less people to email to, which can hurt your ROI. Leveraging all channels (social, SMS, web forms, etc. to recruit new audience members can keep your list healthy and growing. Be sure to validate new email addresses too!
- Audience indifference. If your email list isn’t growing and evolving, it becomes challenging to continue engaging the “same old audience” with fresh content or offers. And as I referenced in part one, audiences tend to change over time, meaning you may find your unsubscribe rate on the rise without new subscribers or customers to inspire fresh ideas for your email marketing. List turnover is a good thing if managed properly.
One Size Fits All Campaigns
Very much tied to indifference are campaigns that have the same message for all recipients with every send. I’m sure many of you reading this are aware that even simple personalization (first name greetings, subject line) can boost email engagement by 15% or more, so taking it a step further and creating segments to target your messaging based on interests, purchases, demographics…whatever information makes sense for your business, can lift performance even further – up to 35% more than without personalization.
For example, create one list for your loyal customers, one for occasional repeat buyers, and another for one-time purchasers that you haven’t heard from in 6-12 months. Each group should receive a different campaign according to their engagement.
Remember to refresh your segments over time to keep up with changes in your business, or to respond to changes in engagement levels among your segments.
Inconsistent Sending
People receive 40 emails per day on average to their personal accounts, and three times as many to their business email address. You can quickly be forgotten if you’re not sending consistently. For those with fully opted-in lists that are sent to on a regular cadence this shouldn’t be an issue, but if your subscribers haven’t heard from you in a while then they may hit the “report spam” button rather than unsubscribe.
If it’s been awhile, a “resfresher” campaign to your list reminding them not only of their subscription but what to expect in the future in terms of content and cadence (how often you’ll be sending) can help re-engage your audience.
A Final Thought
Not surprisingly, staying consistent with best practices goes a long way to solving for the industry challenges to engagement. For those who may need to do some work to make this a habit, invest the time now and watch the effort required diminish over time.
Remember, optimize for engagement and you’ll be set up for sustainable email marketing performance over the long run.
