Marketing Research Chart: Tactics to improve email engagement

In fielding the 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, we received a comment from Brian Reich, Managing Director, little m media, in which he said, "It's not worth sending an email unless there is content worth reading, sharing and discussing. Our ability to source content that has value to our audience(s) and/or create that content ourselves will determine our email marketing strategy."

Indeed, marketers can help determine an email’s value through recipient engagement. But, how are marketers garnering this engagement? To find out, we asked …

Q: Which of the following tactics is your organization using to improve the relevance and engagement of email content delivered to subscribers?

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The most-used tactic for improving customer email engagement was the automatic, triggered email — 39% of our respondents claimed these triggered auto-sends helped improve relevance.

Behavior-based segmentation (37%) and dynamic personalization (36%) were also widely used among surveyed marketers.

Interestingly, tactics that are often used to create a more interactive experience, such as gamification (18%), reward programs (14%) and images/video (11%), were much less commonly used than the afore-mentioned segmentation strategies.

Points to Consider

How have triggered emails performed for your organization, in terms of improving customer email engagement? Do you feel this level of segmentation is ample enough to provide an engaging experience for your readers? How do gamification and/or rewards programs factor in your future email planning?

For more information about email marketing, download the free excerpt from the 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report. Be sure to share your own analysis of this chart in the MarketingSherpa LinkedIn Group for a chance to be published in a future blog post.

Useful links related to this research

Email Marketing: 3 overlooked aspects of automated messages

Marketing Automation: 25% more engagement, 0% unsubscribe in 4-email series

Email Marketing: CNET win-back campaign sees 8% subscriber re-engagement

Trigger Happy: Why emails are the magic bullets of marketing automation and shopping cart recovery