Getting your audience to engage with your emails isn’t a simple task.
There are more than a dozen factors that could impact the performance of a given email.
- The audience’s familiarity with your brand
- The list segment - does the email cater to a specific group or interest?
- Email list quality - Are the email addresses valid and active?
- Your average campaign metrics - bounce rate, spam complaint rate, past engagement
- The content - subject lines, preheader, call-to-action
- Use of spam trigger words
We know you’ve likely felt an impact from one or more of these. Finding actionable solutions feels daunting.
The good news? You’re not alone. Companies and email marketers around the world encounter these issues regularly.
But you can achieve stronger email engagement by using the tactics below. Let’s help you connect with your email audience.
How to get more email clicks: from content to deliverability
Poor email performance is challenging to address if you’re unsure what to measure. When emails don’t get traction, many marketers focus on fixing a single aspect of their strategy when it’s likely a combination of two or more elements.
Before you click send, ask yourself:
- What does your email deliverability look like? Are your previous campaigns being delivered to the inbox, or are they landing in the spam folder?
- Is your email design on-brand and congruent with your other marketing channels (social media, ads, blog, etc.)?
- Does your email list contain valid contacts, or have some of those emails expired?
- Are you segmenting your email database by their specific interests or needs and creating customized content for each group?
Getting a clear understanding of your previous campaign performance will then help you identify the exact factors impacting your email engagement. As a result, you can use data-driven insights to adjust your strategy and increase overall email engagement and clicks.
According to Mailchimp, the average open rate is 21.33% across all industries, and click rates are 2.62%. Although nuanced, if your metrics fall below Mailchimp’s benchmarks, that’s a sign that there’s room for improvement.
1. Keep emails out of spam and reach the customer's inbox
Even a well-crafted, beautiful email is not guaranteed to land in your recipient's inbox.
A significant cause of spam placement is a poor email sender reputation (sometimes called sender score). Your sender reputation is a numerical score from internet service providers (ISPs) to measure your email domain’s health and trustworthiness.
Companies with high sender scores are viewed as legitimate, safe senders, while those with low scores are more likely to be persons or groups associated with spam or phishing attempts. It makes sense that ISPs want to keep those emails out of the inbox.
Here are the known factors that contribute to your sender reputation:
- High bounce rates - Internet service providers want yours to be 2% or lower.
- Spam complaint rate - Aim for no higher than 0.1% (1 in 1,000 emails sent).
- Email list hygiene - Connected to the above, ISPs expect businesses to clean and avoid invalid emails, spam traps, etc.
- Email blacklisting - Blacklist services keep track of untrustworthy, high-risk senders. If your domain is on a blacklist, your reputation will be hit hard.
- Email engagement - When subscribers open your emails and click on the content within. It tells ISPs that your emails are relevant. Staying out of spam will help you improve these metrics.
The risk of spam placement is higher than ever with Google and Yahoo’s latest revised sending requirements. The two tech giants partnered to enforce new email-sending requirements to protect users from malicious senders and high-risk email content.
An overview of Google and Yahoo’s new email sender requirements
In order to fight spam and phishing attacks, both Google and Yahoo revised their sending requirements for those that send more than 5,000 daily emails.
According to Google’s Group Product Manager Neil Kumaran, starting February 1, 2024, “We’re requiring those who send significant volumes to authenticate their emails by following well-established best practices. Ultimately, this will close loopholes exploited by attackers that threaten everyone who uses email.”
So, what does this mean for you? Google and Yahoo both now require each of the following:
- Authenticate your emails - Email authentication verifies that an email sent from your domain comes, indeed, from your organization. While not new practices, the different types of email authentication are now required. They include
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF) - A record that establishes a list of email domains and IP addresses that your company sends email from
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) - A digital signature that verifies your emails. Your email domain has a public key on its DNS records, while the email service provider has a private key. These keys must align.
- Domain-based Messaging, Authentication, and Conformance (DMARC) - A DMARC policy tells email receivers what to do if authentication fails (requires SPF and DKIM).
Email authentication doesn’t just keep you out of the spam folder; it will protect your company and your audience from email fraud. Tools like a DMARC Monitor can simplify the process of authenticating and monitoring your sent emails.
- A one-click unsubscribe method - People should be able to unsubscribe from your email list with just one click, Google and Yahoo state. Adjust your settings to comply with this requirement and honor unsubscribe requests within two days.
- Maintain a low spam complaint - As described above, Google and Yahoo will take note of your spam complaint rate. Keep it below 0.1% (1 in 1,000 emails). You can do this by removing subscribers who report spam, maintaining a predictable sending frequency (don’t send too many emails), and keeping your emails relevant to the audience.
Assess the performance of your latest email campaigns with the above metrics in mind.
If you bounce emails, observe lower-than-average open rates, and haven’t cleaned your email list, your sender reputation might be low. Additionally, You can check your email sender reputation with domain lookup tools like Google’s Postmaster Tools or Barracuda. A score of 70 and above is acceptable, meaning your sender reputation is not the cause of low performance.
However, the lower your sender score, the more likely your emails will land in the spam folder (or get blocked entirely). Fewer eyes on your emails result in fewer clicks, less website traffic, and fewer signups/sales.
2. Email validation is essential for improving email marketing results
Invalid email addresses lead to bounces. If you’re unfamiliar, an invalid email address has one or more of the following issues:
- The email address doesn’t use the proper email address format. A valid email contains a username (the local part) and a domain (e.g., company.com), separated by an ‘@’ symbol.
- The email address uses restricted characters. It’s best practice to use numbers (0-9) and letters (upper or lower case). Special characters (e.g., ! or #) depend on the mail provider. For example, Gmail only allows letters, numbers, and periods.
- The address doesn’t exist on the specified domain.
An email bounce occurs when your email service provider cannot deliver your message due to permanent or temporary errors.
As mentioned earlier, the accepted benchmark for email bounce rate is about 2% (20 out of 1,000 emails sent).
Exceeding this threshold is risky as it increases the likelihood that your future emails will be relegated to the spam folder. Recipient email servers will prioritize companies with better reputations than yours.
Email validation for your email list can help to identify invalid email addresses before you send your next campaign.
According to Yahoo, regularly auditing your database is essential for email deliverability. So, at least once a quarter, validate your database and remove invalid and dormant accounts. On average, 23% of your contacts decay every year, according to the ZeroBounce Email List Decay Report.
Weeding out those poor-quality addresses helps you build a list of real, valid contacts, boosts the visibility of your emails, and provides better opportunities to improve email engagement and conversions.
Even if you don’t see an immediate improvement in email open rates, link or image clicks, or conversions (whatever your goal may be), you’ll have better data to measure performance.
For example - if a campaign has a high bounce rate due to invalid emails, you can’t reasonably attribute poor email performance to other factors like email design or content. Those failed deliveries heavily skew your campaign performance metrics.
With a clean, validated list, you can enjoy the peace of mind of knowing your emails are being delivered. Then, you can accurately assess whether or not an email works or if it’s time to experiment with a new approach.
But before you chalk up a poor campaign to low-quality content or design, know that your audience segment can make a difference. Let’s look at what we mean by email list segmentation and how it impacts engagement.
3. Segment your email list to create more relevant messages
Once you’re confident that your email list is valid and healthy, it’s time to think about
- Who’s on my email list?
- What’s the signup source (a specific blog article, a product page, a social post)?
- Is the reader interested in a specific topic that we can speak to?
- Is this a current customer, a lapsed one, or a new lead?
Leads come to your company for various reasons based on their specific needs. They want answers to their questions and solutions for that need. To further study your audience and understand who they are, you can break down your email list into groups based on demographics, behavior, and psychographics.
Here are some great recommendations to help you start thinking about segmenting your email list:
- Create a list for first-time buyers - They’re new to your service. Welcome and make them feel special by acknowledging their support and suggesting resources relevant to their purchase.
- Create lead nurturing lists - Some subscribers are brand-new to your company, so don’t treat them like any other subscriber. You can further segment your email leads by tracking what caused them to sign up (a webinar attendee, reading a blog article through organic search, in-person meetings).
- Create churn lists - A lapsed customer also represents a unique audience. They’ve used your company, so you can skip the introductions and get right to their needs. Try to find out why they haven’t purchased recently or unsubscribed, and tailor your emails based on the feedback.
- Segment by product interest - If someone is interested in a CRM tool, don’t clutter up their inbox with emails about design tools. If an email lead tells you what they’re interested in, believe them. Create emails explaining your product's benefits and why it’s better than competing options.
You can use a wide variety of attributes to justify email list segmentation depending on the nature of your business and your audience. Some companies even use social data such as gender, age, location, occupation, or income level.
The better you understand the subscriber individually, the better equipped you will be to create a highly effective, personalized email message. Segmenting your list into smaller groups fosters genuine customer relationships and helps build anticipation and loyalty for your brand.
4. Keep your content on-brand and relevant
Creating a cohesive brand experience across all channels builds a recognizable identity for your company. Everything matters – your content, visual assets, and tone of voice all work together to build the public perception of your brand.
To ensure your emails look and sound uniquely like you, assess these key aspects:
- Design: Are your email visuals aligned with the imagery you use on other platforms? From your color palette to the overall vibe of your design, every aspect should further build audience familiarity with a brand.
- Content: Are your emails addressing topics relevant to your industry? Sticking to your niche and sharing high-quality, educational content helps you build trust and authority with your audience.
In streamlining your email creation process and enforcing brand guidelines, consider tools like Beefree.
With Beefree drag-and-drop functionality and Style setting allows you to effortlessly customize and enforce your email designs to align with brand's identity. Once you've established designs that resonates with your audience, Beefree enables you to save your templates and content blocks for future use. In short, Beefree simplifies the creation on-brand emails and saves valuable time and effort, allowing you to focus on delivering consistent and more engaging messages to your subscribers. Plus, Beefree’s agnostic nature makes it easy to easily export your emails to your sending platform of choice.
Overview: Driving Email Engagement with Effective Strategies
Driving email engagement is an ongoing challenge, but it’s manageable when you know how to measure your performance and reach your audience.
- Strive for a strong sender reputation - Monitor your bounces and spam complaints. Look out for risks like email list quality and email blacklists that can hurt your sender score. Also, authenticate your emails to comply with Google & Yahoo’s requirements to keep your emails out of the spam folder and maximize your visibility.
- Validate your email list - Clean up your database at least once per quarter. Using a real-time email validation tool with your email list signup forms will also help you keep invalid emails and spam traps off your email list. A clean email list boosts your email deliverability and enables you to reach the inbox.
- Segment your lists & customize the message - Be thoughtful when approaching your readers. Every customer wants to feel special, and understanding their interests and needs will help you present a meaningful solution. A personalized email meant for an individual will encourage higher open and clickthrough rates.
- Keep your brand’s content consistent - You shouldn’t send emails in a vacuum. Work closely with your website team, ads managers, and social media experts to ensure your messaging is on point. Remind your readers why they’re subscribed to your list and how your company offers something different.
