4 Ways to Increase Email Engagement with Your Current ESP

I get asked the following question quite frequently: “How can I get more out of {ESP name}?” Before I get to the answer, I should say that this is almost never a question about ESPs.

We don't want to downplay the differences between ESPs or the fact that some ESPs offer easier levers that can truly enhance a great email campaign, but our 10+ years of experience in email marketing have also taught us that no matter what ESP you use, you can drive incredible growth by focusing on four core initiatives:

• segmentation.
• Personalization.
• automation.
• design.

You may be wondering what each one contains, so let's take a closer look.

The Key to Email Audience Segmentation

I like to start with segmentation because it has big benefits when done well: Segmentation helps you comply with Gmail's spam guidelines.

Low email engagement is often the result of brands not segmenting their audience and sending messages to the most relevant subscribers. This is true in terms of subscriber characteristics and the type of content they want. In other words, subscribers without children at home are unlikely to respond to products or articles aimed at parents.

Similarly, our brand has found that certain subscribers on their lists love participating in contests, while an equally large segment is not interested in contests, even though they are highly relevant to their interests. By taking this information about your subscribers and building behavioral and demographic-based segments, you can send each segment highly relevant and engaging emails.

What about spam guidelines? Segmenting your least engaged audience and minimizing sending to them is an easy way to stay below the spam red flag threshold.

Learn more: 6 Ways to Increase Customer Engagement and Loyalty with Email Marketing

The keys to successful email personalization

If you’ve been in email marketing for any length of time, you’ve probably heard the word “personalization” so many times you’ve completely forgotten what it means. To me, personalization means building a process that delivers personalization without needing design and development support for every email.

When it comes to personalization elements, consider the content and design of each email and decide:

• What subject line and preview text will most likely get people to open this email? (Of course, the best email design won't get you any engagement if no one opens it.)
• Are your subscribers interested in different media types within your emails? If they prefer multimedia, can you create more multimedia experiences?
• At the most basic level of personalization, can you seamlessly insert an individual's name, loyalty status, and content recommendations related to their demographics and past behavior?
• Does this person have a strong preference for discounts, and what are the most relevant offers or products you can include to address this preference?

Learn more: 4 ways to personalize your emails today

How to use automation to increase email engagement

One of the most overlooked keys to increasing email engagement is sending the right email to the right person at the right time. If you've built your segments and built in some personalization elements as above, incorporating automation can help you achieve great results.

Automation allows you to find the right time and day to send a one-off email. You can make it even more effective by setting up automated triggers to send meaningful follow-up messages based on recent engagement.

In my experience, journeys triggered based on engagement with a brand always have the strongest open, click and conversion rate metrics. We continually work with brands to build more journeys and automations, and increase the number of automated sends to support recent engagements and provide high value and relevance to subscribers.

If you're new to journeys, the welcome journey is obviously the best place to start. It sets the stage to gather behavioral signals that can be used for profiling and segmentation in later campaigns. For example, if you're a CPG brand that sells meat products and new users engage more with chicken-related content than other meat content, make sure to highlight some of your most popular chicken recipes in follow-up emails.

Learn more: An Email Marketer's Guide to Effective Marketing Automation

Design techniques to increase email engagement

Build up a repository of techniques you've used to get good engagement within your emails. Here are some ideas:

• Multimedia TestingFor example, compelling imagery, engagement cues like a video play button, or eye-catching screenshots that link to a longer video.
• Test your CTA See if you can identify patterns across audience segments.
• Make sure the UX is clean and streamlinedFor example, if you offer a discount to a segment that prefers discounts, make it clear where they should click to redeem the offer.

Learn more: 5 Effective Ways to Level Up Your Email Marketing Design

The next time a member of your team (or an ESP sales rep) starts talking about the full capabilities of your ESP and whether you’re using it to its full potential, find a way to nicely steer the conversation towards an audit of the four initiatives listed above.

if you teeth If you can ensure that you do these things, then the question of how ESPs help you achieve incremental growth is the right answer and you will be way ahead in the world of email marketing.