5 Email Marketing Strategies to Boost Engagement in 2023

Marketers who rely on email campaigns to capture customer attention face a complicated, ever-changing environment. An estimated 333.2 billion emails were sent and received daily in 2022. The average office worker receives 120 emails per day. This over-abundance can create email fatigue that lessens the impact of your email marketing strategies.

When subscribers feel overwhelmed by too many emails, they stop engaging with a brand. In fact, Hubspot reports that the most common reason consumers give for unsubscribing from emails is that they come too often.

Given these challenges, marketers need their email marketing to engage customers with timely content that provides value. Deliver it using the following six email marketing strategies—including some that rely on motivation-aware Generative AI.

#1: Send messages at high-engagement times

Many factors can influence whether a customer opens an email—including timing. Hubspot surveyed over 300 U.S. email marketers to find the majority saw the highest email engagement from 9 am and 3 pm on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Finding the best window to send out emails is not an exact science. However, most marketers must experiment with distributing emails at different times to determine that sweet spot for your audience. And since consumer behavior is always changing, you should conduct a dynamic send time experiment at least once a year as to inform your email marketing strategies. The purpose is to reassess when your audience will be most receptive to your message. This effort takes some extra time, but it will be worth it when more readers open campaigns.

#2: Send emails from someone your audience wants to hear from

The sender matters. According to Constant Contact, 68% of consumers decide to open an email primarily based on who sent it. Think carefully about what you put in the sender line, or customers may not recognize your company email when it lands in their inbox. Look at the distribution set up to make sure the sender name and email address reflect your brand.

#3: Focus on quality when building your email marketing lists

The philosophy of more is better may not always apply when it comes to email marketing strategy. After all, if you have recipients on your email distribution list who aren’t really in your target market and aren’t connected to your brand, it will only harm your email performance. These people are never going to open your messages or click on them. Keeping them on your distribution list just hurts your metrics.

Developing a quality email list requires a focus on the following questions: 

  • What value does a customer receive from signing up for your emails?
  • What information does your company provide? 
  • How often will they hear from you?

Expect a better response rate when people opt-in to join your email list. Asking for permission to add someone to a list is a legal necessity in some places and a best practice in most. (You’ll also avoid spam complaints.)

Also, the one-size-fits-all approach rarely drives results in email marketing. Make sure you are properly segmenting your email list and sending content that is actually relevant to the recipients based on specific demographics, behavior, and more. You may discover segments you’ve never even thought of in these 50 email segmentation strategies.  

#4: Optimize open and click rates with AI-generated language

Marketers rely on high open rates and click-through rates as metrics of email marketing campaign success. Open rates reflect the share of successfully delivered emails that were opened. The click rate reflects the share of opened emails that registered at least one click.

Subject lines have a huge impact on open rates—it means the core content, at least at first glance, resonated with your audience. Click rates, in turn, suggest that the body content of the email message is relevant, interesting, or answers a question subscribers have. High levels of both go to the organizations that best understand the interests and issues of their customers and deliver on-point, on-brand content using optimized language.

Brands that use the Persado to optimize their emails campaigns achieve results that speak for themselves:

  • British retailer Marks & Spencer, saw a 20% increase in orders when they used Persado’s specialized Generative AI for the enterprise to optimize their email marketing subject lines. 
  • When Michaels went from personalizing 20% of their email marketing campaigns to personalizing 95% with Persado’s enterprise flavor of motivation-aware Generative AI, they achieved a 25% CTR lift on email campaigns. 

Constant Contact’s latest research (as of January 2023) has captured average trends for the following industries:

Open RateClick Rate
All Industries – Overall Average34.39%1.43%
Financial Services28.30%1.26%
Healthcare35.11%0.92%
Hospitality41.59%1.07%
Retail32.86%0.96%

Some marketers will find that their engagement rates are lower than these averages. But, you can improve them using the Persado enterprise Generative AI designed to optimize subject lines and email body copy.

Many Generative AI applications based on large language models like GPT-3 are certainly able to generate a large number and variety of email subject lines and bodies quickly. But, those messages won’t necessarily capture attention and motivate customers to action unless they reflect insights about the kinds of language that will engage customers in that moment.

In contrast, the Persado Motivation AI Platform, a Generative AI for enterprises, has insights from more than ten years of marketing campaigns that reveal the language that best drives opens, clicks, and conversions. With Motivation AI, brands can identify the best narrative and emotional context for your emails.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

A luxury retailer found AI-generated language drove better email engagement

Customers that use Persado Motivation AI benefit from AI-generated language that leverages the narratives, emotions, descriptions, and other elements that have been statistically proven to motivate your audience.

For example, a luxury retailer was planning an email marketing campaign to increase engagement with its loyalty program. The retailer worked with Persado to optimize the email subject lines for three separate loyalty-focused messages.

In each case, the retailer’s creative team crafted their subject line for the campaign and shared it with Persado. Our Motivation AI analyzed the retailer’s message and generated a series of variants predicted to out-perform the original in the market. Message testing found that the Persado AI-generated language significantly outperformed the retailer’s control message in terms of email opens, click throughs, and ultimate conversions.

A luxury retailer increased email engagement by as much as 60% by optimizing subjects lines using Persado enterprise Generative AI.

#5: Personalize your email marketing campaigns

Today, customers expect personalization. With its specialized Generative AI for enterprise email marketing, Persado clients can personalize messages for high-value segments. By doing so, they deliver a more relevant and targeted experience that drives higher conversions. 

For example, a bank customer of Persado leveraged the Motivation AI platform to generate a specific message targeted to loyalty reward cardholders who preferred to use the cash back option. The personalized AI-generated language resulted in 44% higher engagement than a generic message. 

A Fortune 50 bank increased email engagement by 44% using motivation-aware Generative AI in its marketing strategy.

Generative AI is transformational—even more so when it is built for the enterprise and motivation-aware. As a key input, it can drive engagement and conversion rates can help businesses more effectively leverage their email marketing strategies for revenue growth. Want to learn more about the Persado impact on Generative AI for email marketing? Contact Persado today for more information and a free demo.

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