How To Create Super Engaging Emails Plus 4 Real Life Examples

You’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and resources to get people on your email list. But, once they’re on it how to make sure that they won’t unsubscribe from it, and take the action you want them to take? The answer to this question is engagement.

So what should you do to keep your email subscribers engaged?

Actually, there is no magic formula, but there are few things which you can keep in mind when creating emails to make them super engaging, fun, and worth interacting. Here are four such things:

Use descriptive and personalized subject lines

For email marketing, the subject line is one of the most important element that affects the response rate of your email campaigns achieve. Stats says, “33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone.” The goal of your subject line should be to make your message stand out as much as possible along with clearly telling people what’s in it for them, and why they should open it.

If you’re already using these principles when creating your subject lines, but still not getting great results, try rephrasing. Sometimes simply rephrasing what you’re trying to say can make a big difference.

Make it about them

Just because someone has subscribed to your email list and want to hear from you does not mean that you should talk only about yourself. To make your emails engaging, it’s essential that you make it all about your recipients and not about you. The more you make it about them, the more the chances that they’ll take notice of it and will ultimately start interacting with your messages.

Keep it short and crisp

Nobody likes reading a lengthy email, if you add too much text in your email people will never reach to the bottom of your email. People don’t like reading long emails. So, the goal of your copy should be to summarize in few sentences about the action you want your subscribers to take, and your words should pursue them to take that action.

Use personalization

Contextual marketing is all about personalization. The more personalized your email messages are, the better the chances of subscribers engaging with your marketing messages. Stats from Aberdeen suggests, “Personalized emails improve clickthrough rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%.” The new-age marketing is all about being relevant.

So, if you don’t have enough data about your recipients, adding even basic things like addressing them by their first name can be a really nice touch to start from.

Examples of great emails that engage…

“Good marketing makes the company look smart. Great marketing makes the customer feel smart.” – Joe Chernov

Feel Good Email

 

I received this email from “Tripadvisor” when my review earned its first helpful vote. The subject line of this email grabbed my attention straight away, “You wrote it. They loved it!”.

Everything in this email, right from the subject line to the copy, is crafted in a manner that it made me feel appreciated and good about myself for writing a review on their site.

The email was beneficial for both parties – as a subscriber, they made me feel valued which is a great way of building relationship and encouraging me to return to their site and write few more reviews (as and when I visit a place).

The CTA of the email “See which review it is” seemed odd at first, as I wondered why they want me to check my own review, but in reality it’s a good one as it’s a great way to jog recipients’ memory and made them feel even more special.

The Big Win Email

This email from “Tripadvisor” came with a personalized subject line, “Reshu, you picked a winner!”

The copy of the email is to the point and personalized. Normally, people don’t share email on social networking sites, but if you send someone an email like this, chances are high that they’ll share it. Instead of portraying the place as the winner, they’ve portrayed the recipient as a winner, making it convincing enough to ask the subscriber to spread-the-word.

Even though the primary CTA in the email is “Share on Facebook,” Tripadvisor doesn’t miss the opportunity to try and drive you back to the site to check few more winning hotel listings.

The Behavior-driven Email

I received this email from Hotwire, the email is highly personalized and super targeted which made me to open it, the moment I saw it.

Here’s what makes it super targeted:

The subject line of the email “New price drop on Paris hotels” is highly targeted as I had browsed hotels in Paris on their site a few days back

The email is personalized with my first name

The copy of the email is also highly targeted and showed me the price of the hotel (both original and discounted price) I looked up at their site. Also, they’ve pre-filled my check-in and check-out dates. A perfect reminder to help me get back to their site and complete the booking process I’d left in between.

The Exclusive Promotional Email

According to Experian’s email marketing study, emails with personalized subject lines have 26 percent higher open rates than non-personalized emails. The marketers at Expedia knows this and that’s why they’ve personalized the subject line with my first name to pique my interest.

This email is a great example of how simply using someone’s first name can give a personalized feel even to your promotional email and increase its open rates.  The copy of the email is very persuasive, even though they’ve used only a few words in it.

“Personalized promotional emails have been proven to lift transaction rates and revenue six times higher than non-personalized emails.” Even though they haven’t personalized the body of the email with my location or my browsing history, but they’ve done the work with their personalized tone. And the overall tone of the email can make a huge difference when it comes to your click-through and engagement rates.

This is a guest post from Reshu Rathi, Sr. Marketing Manager at Betaout. Betaout is a customer segmentation and marketing automation platform for Ecommerce