User Engagement 101 & Avoiding the Junk Folder

From simple call-to-action updates to a complete content overhaul, we’re sharing our best user engagement tips and recommended strategies to improve your email opens, sales, phone calls, and responses. This crash course will also dive deep into the dreaded spam box, providing technical recommendations to make sure you’re getting in front of your customers each time.  

Do you need help formulating an email strategy, or designing an email that works? Connect with our team of seasoned email marketing experts for advice or more information on our managed services.

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In today’s day and age, however, user engagement doesn’t just boil down to the technical and scientific side of things. User engagement factors in if people are staying on your webpage and reading the content. It also takes video, imagery, and mobile scrolling into perspective. To break from the technical “stigma,” you need to ask yourself, are your customers paying attention to your brand?

To be a competitive marketer and business owner, you need to start seeing use engagement as an experience, not just a measurable number. To create an effective marketing strategy (with or without email marketing at play), you need to learn about what your customers want to see and what like to engage with.

Before you start putting together any email, we recommend that you generate a customer persona, or visual overview, of who your customers are. Creating these customer personas will help you create targeted campaigns resulting in more email opens and email sales.

Below is a sample persona of our typical customer. Keep in mind, we’re a digital marketing agency and email marketing platform. This persona may vary significantly from what products or services you offer.

2. General Interests: Sports games, camping getaways with his kids. Based on what we saw in Google Analytics (a tool that allows us to track user behavior once a customer visits our website and beyond), we learned that many of our customers, including Cole, liked spending time outdoors in Arizona’s beautiful landscape. He also showed interest in sports games, scores, and events around town. To peak Cole’s interests in our email campaigns, we may change up our guides to feature examples of hikers or campers or offer a special promotion for Arizona Cardinals fans. Since we’re sending him content related to email marketing, we may speak about how implementing an automated email campaign will save you time so you can “get outdoors” more. Since Cole’s interests only account for a small part of our email marketing customer base, we may just change a few images or video shots in our marketing materials to peak Cole’s interests. When creating dynamic content centered around general interests, you can’t expect to see an immediate change in calls and click-throughs as soon as you go live. Test different designs and try incorporating different images, coupons, or brand messages until you find a winning combination.

Dynamic content targeting is essential if you want customers to read what you have to say, and take action from your message. By customizing each campaign to fit a particular persona, rather than pushing the same message out to all of your subscribers, you are creating a more engaging experience for your users. From a technical side, you can expect to see increased clicks. From a general experience side, you can expect to hear more feedback from your customer, or at least see that they’re taking the time to open and read your email.

Promotions Focused on Customer Value

If you know what your customers are looking for from the beginning, you can save the back and forth, ignored phone calls, and angry “can you please unsubscribe me” emails. The only thing worse than receiving a message that you didn’t sign up for is receiving a message that isn’t of value to you. By curating promotions and content that fits what your customers are asking for, you can expect to see a higher return all-around.

For Cole Morrison, a quick email exchange after he first signed up gave us insight into what matters to him.

1. Authenticity: Authenticity matters to Cole. He doesn’t want to read the same old guides or articles that are passed along from marketing agency to marketing agency. To support Cole’s need for authenticity, we make sure that our communications only feature blog content and guides that we wrote and developed ourselves.

2. Easy to follow guides: Tucson Landscape Design & Maintenance is a growing business - Cole doesn’t have the time to pick apart a million guides to get to the information that will help his business online. To simplify his experience and keep him engaged, we only make sure to share guides that “get to the point” and feature content that can easily be digested on a bus ride or drive to a camping site. To make it more personal, whenever we publish a new “How-To,” blog, we send a group of our subscribers an email notification with a quick download link.

3. Hands-on communication: For Cole, he’s sick of waiting on support lines for hours at a time, only to be told that he needs to submit a ticket and wait for another 48-hours. One of the main reasons why he chose FireDrum Email Marketing is because of our hands-on communication, live chat features, and human support line that’s available on his schedule. To make his experience more personalized, rather than linking all of our call-to-actions from our email newsletters to a “contact us” page, we may drop our phone number directly in the message so he can quickly call us if he has any questions. Depending on your business, you may also want to add links that open Google Maps automatically so customers can get directions to your store right away.

Considering customer value is an integral part of any email marketing campaign. What promotes your company more than making a satisfied customer? Email messages catered to fit customer values will result in more email sales and potential referral traffic.

Copy Tailored to Speak to Demographic and Education

The fastest way to drop engagement is to send and promote content that doesn’t speak to or at the level the subscriber. If I’m talking to our hard-working Cole Morrison who attended a trade school, why would I send him content that’s written for medical grad students? Looking at this situation from another perspective, if I’m advertising million dollar homes in Telluride, Colorado, would I illustrate my email in pictures drawn by an elementary school student? To avoid this common pitfall, it’s vital that you take a cold, hard look at your target demographic. Make sure you’re not speaking in terms that are irrelevant or outside of their education range. If your copy truly speaks to your reader and target customer, you will see  increased email opens starting from the subject line and into the newsletter itself.

Nurturing Campaigns Centered on Pain Points

Users subscribed to your newsletter for a reason. Whether it’s to grab your amazing offers or for real-world education and application, you need to be wary of why your customers signed up. Based on our 20 years of experience in the email marketing world, we can confirm that a subscription typically starts with an issue or a need for something. In Cole Morrison’s situation, he needed help getting his digital marketing efforts up to speed and his investment to start seeing a return. Through email newsletter personalization, we will be able to nurture Cole’s pain points into a lasting relationship. Learn more about lead nurturing and drip marketing campaigns in our blog “Increase Sales & Create Loyal Customers with Lead Nurturing - The Complete Guide.”

1. Cole is investing a small fortune into marketing but isn’t seeing a return. Sending newsletters that promote more website views won’t be sufficient for Cole. He wants to learn how to grow his business, increase phone calls, and make more email sales. For his growing landscaping business, we may suggest ways to promote his phone number and provide insight into healthy cost-per-actions.

2. His competitors are beating him out with paid advertisements around town and online. To keep Cole engaged and subscribed to our newsletter, we will make sure to avoid sending him details about Google Ads and Facebook Advertising strategies. Instead, we’ll push tips and guides that explain how Tucson Landscape Design & Maintenance can rise above paid competitors and make more sales by nurturing his customer base. Depending on his interests and response, we may set-up trigger campaigns that automatically send Cole new articles relevant to items he clicked on in the last email we sent over.

3. He’s hoping email marketing will work for him but doesn’t know where to start. For many small business owners and entrepreneurs, learning every marketing channel can be overwhelming and sometimes impossible. We understand Cole’s concerns with email marketing and want to support him in every way possible. To ensure he’s receiving the education he needs, we’ll add him to our sign-up/onboarding drip campaign that leads our users down the path to success. Our first few emails talk about how to navigate FireDrum Email Marketing’s robust software, then dives into different engagement and automation tools that Cole Morrison can use. If we notice that Cole is starting to lose interest or continues to struggle with launching his email campaigns, we may introduce managed email marketing options.

Both of these nurturing campaigns are designed to touch our client’s pain points, giving him the information he needs to become a smarter marketer and more confident business owner. If you’re struggling with determining what your subscriber’s pain points are, try reaching out to them directly or creating an online survey that they can fill out on their own time. The data you collect should help you separate users into targeted/segmented lists. Once you separate each user and start sending them relevant campaigns, you can expect to see more engagement (email opens) and direct sales on your side.

Tips to Avoid the Spam Folder & Other Explanations

Our email engagement tips and best practices come in handy when we’re working to nurture our clients, but we have yet to talk about an essential step in the process - making sure your email won’t land in the spam box! There are a variety of reasons why your email may miss your subscriber’s inbox, but many of them can be avoided by following the spam filters’ do and don’t list.

Spam Filter Do’s

• Do get permission from your subscribers. Toss out the email list you purchased and work to build an authentic, organic email marketing list. The emails you collect in-store or by following one of our unique methods are real customers who want to make another purchase at your store or eventually make their first investment into one of your products/services. Buying email subscribers are against the CAN-SPAM ACT and will hinder your engagement metrics drastically.
• Do set up a detailed email subscribe form. If your email provider offers a custom subscribe form option like FireDrum Email Marketing, we suggest that you invest some time into personalizing your form and adding custom fields. This shows ISPs, or internet service providers, that your subscribers are authentic and the data you collect can be used down the road to send winning campaigns.
• Do follow best practices when it comes to warming up your IP. If you recently switched email service providers and you are trying to show ISPs that you’re a reputable and credible sender, jumping in and sending massive amounts of emails at once won’t help your case. Make sure you’re following FireDrum’s best practices for migrating ESPs to avoid ISPs dinging your account and sending you to the spam filter.
• Do make sure your logo and company information is apparent on each email. Even if you’re sending emails every week, your customers may forget who you are and send you to their spam folder. To avoid this dilemma, make sure your brand/logo is clear and placed in the header of your email newsletter. Adding your contact information right below the header with links to your social profiles will help build your subscriber’s memory and trust.
• Do update your ESP account whenever there’s a change in your company. Did your brand name change? Your address? The primary salesperson attached to each email? Always make sure your company’s information (name, address, phone number, from name, business address, etc.), is up to date to avoid triggering spam filters. The CAN-SPAM ACT prohibits the use of misleading “from” names like “The White House” or “NASA.”
• Do follow HTML best practices when it comes to email design. Most email providers like FireDrum have specific HTML protocols in place to ensure you don’t land in the spam box, but you should always check the following items to make sure you’re following best practices:
  • YOUR SUBJECT LINE ISN’T IN ALL CAPS.
  • Your HTML code is clean and straightforward. Try to avoid lines of useless HTML.
  • Your image to text ratio is low. Be expressive in your messages, but make sure your readers have breaks between each section.
  • Your images are a reasonable size. Don’t upload 7,000 px images and expect good results. Compress your images before inserting them into your newsletter.
  • Your newsletter is mobile friendly.
• Do ask your subscribers to whitelist your email address. In your welcome email drip campaign or initial “hello,” message, ask your customers to whitelist your from address. Sure, not all customers will go through the steps, but even a few users that mark your email as “safe” will show ISPs that you’re a reputable sender and will avoid filtering your emails as spam.

Spam Filter Don’ts

• Don’t partner with an unreputable sender. If you’re searching for a new email provider, make sure you partner with someone established and well known. Many third-party senders and “sure, we’ll do it” agencies don’t have any policies or procedures in place to remove or limit the number of spammers using one IP address.
• Don’t forget to clean your email list periodically. If you’re seeing a lack of engagement on the subscriber side, try sending your users a win-back campaign. If your win-back campaign doesn’t “win-back” some users, manually unsubscribe them from your account. A lack of engagement can trigger specific spam filters, potentially pushing all of your emails to a spam box. This can be avoided if you cleaned out inactive users on a regular basis.
• Don’t create misleading or inaccurate subject lines. Although it may be tempting, tricking your subscribers won’t help your company's reputation, your client’s patience, or the credibility of your IP. Make sure you’re always clear (but fun) in your subject lines to avoid penalty. Common deceptive subject lines that can cause more spam complaints than compliments:
  • “Did I leave my scarf at your house?”
  • “Re: Urgent Matters”
  • “FWD: News about your son/daughter.”
  • “Thanks for your recent purchase.”
• Don’t remove the “unsubscribe” option on your email. It can be heartbreaking when a subscriber decides they don’t want updates from your company anymore, but it will be more devastating when you start to see all of your emails being routed to the spam box due to multiple complaints. Make sure the unsubscribe link in your email is always clear and never hidden. Ongoing complaints through ISPs will trigger the spam filter and could cost your business thousands in fines.

• Don’t use the following “trigger” words. Incorporating these words into your campaign should be avoided, unless it’s truly applicable to your company (i.e., “risk-free trial - no sign-up fees!”) If you’re unsure of your email’s verbiage, run a test in FireDrum Email Marketing’s built-in spam check.
  
  • amazing
  • at home work
  • cancel at any time
  • check or money order
  • click here
  • congratulations
  • dear friend
  • fast cash
  • for only ($)
  • free or toll-free
  • great offer
  • guarantee
  • increase sales
  • meet singles
  • money making
  • money money money
  • nigerian
  • notes
  • online biz opportunity
  • order now
  • promise you
  • risk free
  • special promotion
  • this is not spam
  • viagra
  • winner
  • work from home
  • and more

Crash Course 101 Summary

As a growing business, we understand that you don’t have all the time in the world to become an email expert. With the time you do have, we urge you to follow our user engagement and spam box tips to get in front of your customers and ahead of your competitors. Applying these strategies and listening to your customers will help you achieve the open rates and sales you’re looking for, but it’s also important that you conduct some testing on your own. Explore what your customers may like by conducting A/B campaigns to find a winning strategy that resides well with your subscriber base.  

Need help? Speak to our team of email marketing specialists to learn about our managed services and to gain additional knowledge around email engagement.