In the Name of Engagement

Happy to be sharing some solid tips and advice about one of my favourite subjects… “Getting Engagement”.

No matter how you cut up any marketing communication plan, if you don’t get engagement then you have wasted your time. Is that being too harsh? Are there other considerations that I am missing?

Basically, to my mind at least, the name of the game is to get a recipient of your message to do something. And there are some tried and true ways to get that to happen. Funnily enough much of what I about to say boils down to having a plan that recognises the human element of every communication and sticking to this plan. For this blog, I am focusing on email marketing because, let’s face it, this is where we play more often than not these days.

Let’s start with where every email campaign has to start…

The Top 4 reasons people open an email are:

  1. Personal Correspondence

  2. Promotional message from a familiar brand

  3. New products from a familiar brand

  4. An expected Newsletter

All logical enough and clearly that is what we would expect to find from any poling of our audience. It is obvious that the content of these emails would have the highest level of relevancy for the recipient, so they are likely to produce the best open rates.

So, what do you have to do to get these sorts of open rates and engagement? Here is a high level summary of an excellent article from Campaign Monitor. Click HERE to read the full article.

Let’s begin with the most important parts of the process for your email messages.

Welcome Journey

  • At the start of any relationship, the rules of engagement are established. This is no different. Your plan and structure of the JOURNEY will be the way you determine whether there is profit from this relationship. This is not one email, this is a JOURNEY.

Tell YOUR Story

  • The more you share about yourself and your products, the better the relationship will be. The words authentic, transparent, honesty, ethics, and responsibility mean everything here. Make sure that what you share is real. it will bring extraordinary results.

Make the OFFER - with real incentives

  • No matter what industry or product category you are in, there is competition for your audience’s attention and wallet. So, make them the offer they can’t refuse. Whether this is an up-sell, cross-sell, repeat sale or a referral, is your offer is better than your competition? Don’t assume that a previous customer will remain your customer…stay in the game and make the offer.

Revamp the Transactional Emails

  • Got to say that this is such a lucrative environment to keep your customers engaged. Offers, tips, advice and alerts built into transactional emails are invaluable. Note that these types of emails are likely to have the highest levels of open rates and engagement.

We all know what needs to happen, but often, it is the process and plan that either takes over and not allow for the a better performance or we don’t have a plan that recognises that there is a human at the end of the process. It is the human engagement with another human that has to drive the process and plan.

Perhaps the best tip of all… make sure that you are part of the journey. Put yourself into the process and then assess it critically at every step of the journey. How does it look? How does it feel? Are you excited? A personal critical analysis is the best place to start to do it better.

Again, great article, it is a long read, but well worthwhile: HERE

Abramo Ierardo