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Archive for the ‘Engagement’ Category

6 Things Your Subscribers Expect You To Do Differently

Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013

When we talk about “the evolution of email” part of what we’re referring to is the technology and how we as marketers use it. Industry-side evolutions in the past year or two include the linking of email and social, marketing automation, triggered messages and data integration. But I believe most of email’s evolution is centered around subscriber behavior. Much of the direction email marketing takes is guided by what our subscribers want (or don’t). Keeping up with the most recent technology is not as important as meeting our subscribers’ expectations.

As your subscribers’ expectations have evolved over the past couple of years, has your email marketing kept stride? Here are some of the things they would like you to do differently, if you aren’t already:

1. Provide more subscription options.
One size does not fit all in email subscriptions. Increasingly your subscribers want to receive narrower channels of content from you. Replace your “all subscribers” list with separate lists dedicated to the different types of content you distribute: conference marketing, newsletters, industry or company news, etc. If you already do that, look for ways to make your lists narrower still. For example, segment your conference marketing by area of functional responsibility or seniority, or launch newsletters for each strategically important segment of your subscriber base.

2. Provide no subscription options.
Instead of using a preference center to let subscribers select the content channels they’d like to receive, many brands are relying on internal data instead to pair subscribers with the most relevant content for them. The prerequisite for this approach of course is to have enough data about subscribers that you can steer the best content to them without them requesting it, giving brands that integrate a CRM or AMS system with email a distinct advantage. The upside to the approach is that it allows the marketer to send and even develop content based on observing subscribers instead of asking them. Henry Ford famously said that if he asked his first customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse. The marketer knows better than subscribers what content does or possibly could exist. Moving to a data-driven subscription model allows for innovation and flexibility, and removes the burden of choice from your subscribers.

3. Target content more precisely.
Both #1 and #2 above contribute towards the same objective of targeting content more precisely. Even if you pursue neither of those however, it is an objective worth pursuing in other ways. Your subscribers are receiving more emails from more brands than ever, while at the same time trying to manage communications in increasingly pervasive social and mobile channels. For your content to stick it needs to be more relevant, almost as though it was created expressly for each individual subscriber. Try going narrower with your content and aiming to be very relevant to a smaller percentage of your subscribers, instead of being sort of interesting to everyone. You may find you are able to break through with people who had been ignoring you, and may also discover that the subscribers you engaged with broader content are as connected as ever.

4. Make messages mobile-ready.
Mobile opens have already surpassed desktop clients like Outlook and web-based services like Gmail, and are poised to reach 50% of total email opens by the end of the year. While it is true that many subscribers who see a message on mobile will also find it later on their PC, it is also true that subscribers will act on a mobile message if it is optimized for that platform. Not only should it render well, but if you know a quarter or even half your audience is going to open the message first on a smartphone, that knowledge should influence your subject line and copy length (both of which need to be especially tight), your landing pages, and even your call-to-action. For now, consumers will ignore messages that are not mobile-ready; soon they will start ignoring the brands that send them.

5. Include a functioning reply-to email.
If you want your subscribers to interact with your emails, what is more natural than simply allowing them to reply in the same way they do to the messages from real people that continue to command their attention? Subscribers may not want to have a conversation with you or to be your friend, but they may have questions based on the message you have sent. Facilitating and even inviting a reply – instead of sending them to an online form or some other channel – will go a long way towards letting them know you are as attentive to them as you would like them to be to you.

6. Make unsubscribing easy.
Sting said, “If you love somebody, set them free.” What I think he meant is that if you love keeping your delivery rates high, set the people who don’t love you free. An unsubscribe link that is hidden or buried, or that opens a page with an extra step or a final plea to stay connected, complicates the unsubscribe process. Often, when faced with these extra steps the easiest thing for a subscriber to do is simply mark your message as spam. So that’s what they do, even if they know they opted in and the message is technically not an unsolicited message. Spam complaints are the most heavily weighted factor on deliverability. Making it easy for a subscriber to leave will help you reach more of those who want to stay.

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Using Subscriber Metrics to Target by Engagement

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

We know who our email subscribers are based on what they tell us: name, company, title, location and other information collected at signup or through ongoing interaction with them. But we know what email messages they will respond to based on their actions. Of the two, the more valuable information for targeting is the latter; what links in messages your subscribers have clicked, what they have registered for or purchased, and how recently they have last engaged with your brand are all insights that can help you deliver much more targeted and relevant messages than knowing someone’s title or city.

One way to target by engagement is simply binary; either a subscriber is engaged with your brand or is not. What constitutes simple engagement varies from brand to brand, though commonly a subscriber is considered unengaged if s/he has not opened or clicked on an email in 6-12 months. The time frame varies depending on the brand, its products and the selling cycle. For example, an association with a far-reaching Annual Conference might see many of its subscribers go dark in the ten months between last year’s event and the marketing for this year’s. At the other end of the spectrum, a publisher whose principal business is the distribution of daily or weekly newsletters might consider someone unengaged after a far shorter time of non-response.

The most common approach for simple engagement targeting is to maintain the status quo for engaged subscribers, and moving unengaged subscribers into a separate group for fewer mailings or dedicated winback campaigns. A more advanced approach is to look for tiers or specific types of engagement and target based on those. Here are some examples:

Perpetually Engaged:
Most of your subscribers like you, but some positively love you. They are the ones that open and click almost every message, often within moments of receiving each one. If you think about your sending frequency as an attempt to match supply up with audience demand, you can see that with this group demand may be outstripping supply. Even with all of the attention on inbox clutter, every brand has some heavily engaged subscribers who want even more messages. Put your perpetually engaged subscribers into their own group and pump up the volume, slowly at first and monitoring engagement rates closely. You may find you can increase frequency by 50%, 100% or more, with the same lift in sales, ad revenues or whatever other business objective your emails support.

Unconverted Clickers:
With most emails, you measure the number of clicks but you are really after conversions – conference or webinar registrations, subscription purchases, membership renewals or other transactions. When marketing against these objectives, your email metrics allow you to see some progress through the sales cycle. What your subscribers click on can provide some insight into their interest in a purchase, even if they have not yet converted. Use this insight for follow-up messages. For example, subscribers who click on the “Networking opportunities” link in a conference marketing emails might find a message later with a complete list of registered companies to be just the information they need to complete a registration. Similarly, someone who clicks on the “see pricing here” link but does not convert may be particularly responsive to a targeted discount.

Social Clickers:
The people who click on the social links in your email – either the Share With Your Network links or those that direct them to your presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other channels – tell you something very important about themselves; they are very likely active on these channels themselves. You can use this information in subsequent emails a couple of different ways. First, you can include more channel-specific content for these subscribers in your next messages. For example, if someone clicks on a link to your LinkedIn page, you could include a section in a subsequent message where you mention your most recently uploaded SlideShare presentations (SlideShare is owned by LinkedIn). Second, you can take full advantage of this audience’s social propensities by asking them to share content across their networks. It could be content within the email itself, or you can use the email to point at content in your social channels that is ripe for sharing.

In all of these examples, a large enough group of subscribers with the same behavior is required to justify the extra resources needed for the deeper segmentation and targeting. How large that is depends on what kind of results the targeting drives. For this reason, start by looking for a group with similar behavior (a particularly popular link in a message, for example) and then identifying what commonality is driving that behavior, and what an appropriate follow-up may be. Even if these efforts do not drive an enormous immediate ROI, there is always intrinsic value to delivering more relevant messages to smaller groups of subscribers.

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5 Emails Where Metrics Mislead

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

Email metrics are critical to our understanding of how well our messages perform. Except when they’re not. Sometimes metrics do not tell you the whole story, and they even tell a misleading story on occasion. One of the most common misrepresentations we see in email metrics is where a relatively small number of clicks is interpreted to mean that a message was not particularly engaging. This isn’t always the case.

Here are a few examples of messages that won’t draw a lot of clicks, but which may nevertheless be working as hard as anything else in the inbox:

The Thought Leadership Newsletter
Newsletters are many brands’ benchmark messages, and carry the brunt of an email strategy. If your newsletter is built around a number of story abstracts with links to more information on each on your site or across the web, seeing clicks register is an indication of engagement. But if the purpose of the newsletter is to be useful right within the inbox, such as a thought leadership piece which includes a complete article , a lack of clicks may be OK. Messages designed to build engagement right within the inbox do not need clicks (or even links) to be successful. It’s true that you give up some insight on what people like, but there is also a brand impact and engagement that comes from the very act of subscribing, noticing and reading. The other upside to messages like this is that they help cement your subscribers’ engagement with the email channel. Messages designed to send them to your website underscore the value of your site and its content, while messages that reward the very act of opening and reading show the usefulness of your emails themselves.

The Coming Soon or The Week Ahead Email
Some retailers (like the Clymb) will send an email about “upcoming sales this week,” or a trade association may publish a weekly update about relevant dates and deadlines over the coming few days. Like the thought leadership newsletters, these messages earn their keep simply by being read, and help build pre-engagement for the messages later on with clearer and more immediate calls to action. Not seeing clicks on messages of this type is fine. The metric to watch instead is unsubscribe rate, as you want to make sure people find them useful enough to continue devoting some inbox real estate to them.

The Narrow Topic to a Broad List
If you do a good job with your subject line letting subscribers know what’s in an email, those interested will click. Likewise, those not interested will not. That’s also good – you’ve respected their time and kept them attentive until the next message. You will not see opens and clicks from this audience but that doesn’t mean your message was a bust, particularly if those who did read found the narrow content particularly engaging. The important element here is the narrow content, not the broad list. Broad content to a broad list that does not generate clicks may well signal that in an effort to be a little relevant to everyone, the message was genuinely interesting to few.

The Announcement
Some emails are meant to simply announce something – the appointment of a new CEO, a change in the company’s privacy policy or the opening of a new location. In many cases, these messages see few clicks because they include few links, or the ones they do simply link to “more information” on a topic that the newsletter has just effectively exhausted. In these messages, however, including contextual links to enable some measure of tracking may actually be a good idea just to make sure they are worth sending in the first place. Many messages in this group fall into the “let’s tell everybody” category, and end up with such low engagement that they come closer to telling nobody.

The Offline Call To Action
If the call to an action in a message is “visit us at Booth 45” or “print this out to receive 20% off your next in-store purchase” a lack of measurable activity might not signal a lack of engagement at all. Brands focused on clicks may overlook offline calls to action altogether, which can be a mistake. Some of your best customers exist in the real world almost as much as they do online.

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A New Way to Look at Engagement Metrics: By Subscriber Instead of Campaign

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

When most marketers hear the term “engagement metrics” they think of open rate, click rate and conversions – the analytics we use to track a how well a message performed. Analyzing our messages in this way is useful because it allows us to compare this week’s to last week’s, isolate why changes in responses occur, and try to improve our subsequent messages based on what we learn.

However, there are also some shortcomings with this approach to engagement metrics. While measuring response at the message level ostensibly tells us how well our messages are performing, it is prone to error. For example, if you sent a message between Christmas and New Year’s and saw that your open and click rates were depressed, you would likely conclude that many of your subscribers were on vacation and not paying attention to emails. But some of your subscribers are on vacation every day, which means that every message you send suffers from the same audience absenteeism you see during the holidays. Look also at open rates. If you write excellent subject lines that telegraph the content of your emails very well, the people interested in that content are likely to open them. By the same token, a well-written subject line tells subscribers who are not interested in that content to ignore the message, which many do. You have a record of the openers being engaged, but can’t you also make the argument that those who read the subject line and decided that this particular message does not apply to them (maybe promoting a white paper on a topic that is outside of their area of responsibility) are engaged also? They have engaged with your message by not reading it, though the brand interaction may well be as strong as those who did read it.

What we normally think of as engagement metrics then do not really measure subscriber engagement as much as message engage-ability. A better metric to evaluate the health of our email program would be one that measures how many of our subscribers are engaged, and how deeply. Put another way, when you launch a series of emails to promote an upcoming conference, you are less interested in how many opens and clicks each message will generate as you are in how many of your subscribers are likely to attend. Subscriber engagement metrics can give us visibility into the results your email program might yield.

Here are a few ways to begin looking at subscriber engagement metrics:

Add the element of time.
When you look at a message’s engagement metrics, you might see that 200 subscribers out of your 1,000 subscribers opened it, and 50 clicked. You can deduce then that the 800 who did not open the message are not engaged with it, but does that not mean they are not engaged with your brand? To find out, add the element of time. Instead of tracking the number of opens and clicks for a single message, track them instead over a month or a quarter or a year. If you mail a weekly newsletter it is bound to reach some people when they do not have the time or inclination to read, which depresses that message’s metrics. But how many of your 1,000 subscribers have opened or clicked at least one time in the past month, or 4 sends? Chances are very good that if you average 200 opens and 50 clicks for each one, your total number of engaged users will be higher than that as it is not the same 200 people opening and 50 people clicking each time. Tracking over time lets you better size your engaged audience. You may have the attention of fully half of your list, instead of the 20% suggested by each message’s results.

Weight for recency.
A subscriber who clicked on yesterday’s newsletter may be no more engaged with your brand than one who clicked last week but not this week, but at some point the duration since a subscriber’s last interaction does matter. What that duration is depends on your content strategy and frequency. For example, many retailers see a huge percentage of their subscribers go dark for 11 months, only to return predictably during the holiday season. Trade associations that focus on a large Annual Conference see similar patterns. Other brands are relying on email to keep their subscribers engaged and connected throughout the year, so a lapse of even a few weeks can signal waning engagement. When you track subscriber engagement over time, consider weighting recent interactions more heavily. For example, someone who opened or clicked in the past two weeks might be considered engaged, while someone who last interacted between two and four weeks ago might be 50% engaged (or rather, you will need two of these people to equal a single fully engaged subscriber).

Identify tiers of engagement.
With engagement tiers you are not looking just at how recently someone interacted, but how likely someone is to interact with your next message. Recency alone does not get you there. For example, Subscriber A may have opened and clicked on a message yesterday, but had not interacted with your brand at all for the past three months. Subscriber B did not open or click yesterday’s message, but did open and click six of the past eight messages. Which of the two is more likely to interact with the next message? Build your engagement model to account for both recency and frequency in order to group your subscribers into tiers that more accurately reflect their level of engagement, and predict future interaction. Then compare your results on subsequent sends to see how what percentage of subscribers in each tier actually did interact. Does “Fully Engaged” mean that 100% interact with at least one message in a two week period, or 75%? Does “Moderately Engaged” mean that 25% interact, or is it as high as 50%? After a few sends, you will know how many subscribers are in each of your tiers and how likely each is to interact over a period of time. That allows you to calculate – and track – how engaged your list is overall.

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Re-engage with a Survey (WHITE CARD)

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

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For more White Cards, visit our Facebook page.

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Turn Your Engaged Subscribers Into Advocates with a Momentum Campaign (WHITE CARD)

Wednesday, January 16th, 2013

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For more White Cards, visit our Facebook page.

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7 Ways to Segment Your Email List

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

A recent survey of digital marketers by Econsultancy shed some light on how important targeting and segmenting is this year. When asked which digital marketing opportunities were “most exciting” in 2013, 35% of marketers cited “Targeting and Personalization,” the exact same number who identified “Social Media Engagement” as exciting. Only “Mobile Optimization” received scored higher, at 43%.

What was most interesting about the study to me however is the trending in the data. Social Engagement was down 19 points from 54% in 2012. And Targeting wasn’t even considered exciting enough last year to be included in the 2012 survey. And yet here it is, right up at the top. Email’s stock is on the rise this year, driven largely by the opportunities that exist to reach increasingly smaller segments with narrower and more relevant messages.

Data integration and marketing automation is one way to achieve targeting and personalization, but it is not the only way. Good old fashioned list segmentation works too, allowing you to organize your subscribers into smaller and more like-minded groups, for more targeted messaging.

Here are 7 ways to segment your email list right now, with the data you already have:

1. New subscribers
Even if someone just joined your list, you still know something very important about them already – they just joined your list. Create a “new subscribers” segment and send versions of your emails that recognize these subscribers might not have as much experience with your brand as others. Focus on introductory offers and educational content that teaches them about your brand and products.

2. Geography
Targeting by geography serves a couple of different purposes. On the one hand, it creates opportunities to include content relevant to different markets (e.g. airline rates to your conference from the specific city in which the subscriber is located). It also allows you to group subscribers by time zone, so that you can stagger the sending of your messages to reach the inbox at the ideal time in each location.

3. By ISP
You have long known what customers’ accounts are with Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and other ISPs. Now with each of them adding new inbox tools and filters, there is an opportunity to send slightly modified messages to segments for each ISP for whitelisting purposes. For example, Hilton HHonors Program recently sent an email to Gmail subscribers with the Gmail-specific pre-header text, “Priority Inbox Users, please click the (+) to ensure that you see our latest offers.”

4. Prospects vs Customers
The main difference between prospects and customers is that customers have already responded to your brand, which allows you to communicate with them at the product level. Prospects may be interested in specific products, but teaching them more about your brand puts you in a position to sell all of your products, which is advantageous if you do not know what specifically they are interested in (as is often the case with prospects). Having a segment of previous customers at the ready also facilitates customer loyalty offers and promotions.

5. Purchasers of similar products
Knowing what someone has purchased previously (or what event someone has registered for) can be an enormous lift when marketing a new product or event. Not only can an email suggest a new purchase, but a message written expressly around a segment of past purchasers or a specific product can also detail why they would like what is now on offer.

6. Recency of Engagement
Winback Campaigns are common and sensible; take a segment of your list that has been unresponsive for a significant period of time, and create a separate campaign for them which acknowledges as much and tries to bring them back into the fold. What is less common and carries a much greater opportunity is a Momentum Campaign aimed at the segment of your list that has been exceedingly well engaged recently. These are the people hanging on everything your brand is saying, and are most responsive to requests to share content and take other action that evangelizes your brand and product.

7. Consistency of Engagement
Just as you have subscribers who only pay attention to emails around a once-per-year conference or a seasonal promotion or activity, you also have some who seem to click on almost every email you send. A common practice is to curtail some messages to the seasonally engaged so they do not become bored and unsubscribe before the period when they are likely to click and/or convert. With the consistently engaged, there may be a need to send even more messages their way, as your supply may not yet have met their demand. Creating a segment specifically for this group can yield incremental engagement and selling opportunities.

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Are Email Marketers Outrunning The Bear?

Thursday, January 10th, 2013

Originally published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 1-9-14.

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There is a joke I frequently tell clients and use in presentations as an analogy for email marketing. Like everyone else I’ve told it to, you’ve probably heard it before. Please indulge me anyway:

A woman met her friend at the trailhead for an all-day hike in the wilderness. Her friend showed up carrying a heavy pack filled with a day’s worth of food and water and emergency provisions in case they got lost. He wore long pants and sleeves to protect himself from poison oak and mosquitoes, and his feet were shod in heavy hiking boots. The woman, in stark contrast, was dressed in running shorts and a tank top, with lightweight running shoes on her feet. She began stretching.

The man looked at her, puzzled. He asked why she was dressed like that for hiking. She replied that there had recently been a number of reported brown bear sightings in these woods, and she wanted to be prepared to make a quick escape.

“But brown bears can run 40 miles per hour. You’re never going to outrun a bear!” he exclaimed.

She looked at his long pants, burdened backpack and heavy boots and replied, “I don’t have to outrun the bear.”

I’ve used this joke to make the point that marketers’ biggest competition in the inbox is clutter, and that to succeed with email all they needed to do was beat the bell curve so that theirs is not one of the messages to be ignored, deleted or filtered. But the email landscape is fundamentally different in 2013 than it was a couple years ago. Today we have to contend with:

- Email volume continues to rise, to the point where consumers are no longer distinguishing between unsolicited spam and messages they simply can’t be bothered with right now.

- The availability of inbox management tools (Alto, Inky, Mailbox app, Glider and many others) has blossomed from cottage industry into hotly contested market.

- Corporations are studying the productivity loss from time spent in email, and even banning email for internal communications.

- The biggest email story (now that the Petraeus scandal has faded) in business and mainstream media is how to deal with bloated inboxes. The “Today Show,} Forbes, USA Today, lifehacker and many others revisit the topic regularly.

- The M&A activity around email over the past year has been staggering, with much of the investment going into automation. This means each of us will receive more messages than ever.

To continue to succeed in and after 2013, marketers must do far more than be slightly less disruptive, annoying or irrelevant than the next message in the inbox. Success in the inbox of the (very near) future means forging genuine engagement by learning about each of our subscribers and – importantly – acting on that knowledge with every message.

Many of the tactics email marketers currently use do fulfill the need the bear joke defines. Symbols in subject lines, embedded multimedia, preference centers that relieve us of the burden of data mining and targeting, even A/B testing that helps us lift the performance of each message but doesn’t improve our overall program — all these leave our hiking-booted companion behind us on the trail so that we can live to email another day.

But tactics that are as easy to implement as a change of shoes do not position our email programs to continue to thrive as the channel inevitably evolves. Rather, systemic and strategic improvements are necessary: data integration, marketing automation, responsive design, proactive analysis and segmentation, and dynamic content are some of the approaches that will quickly evolve from cutting-edge to cost of doing business.

The changing landscape means that (mercifully) I need to find some new material. Outrunning the bear is no longer an appropriate metaphor for email marketing, not when we’re hiking through a forest full of bears.

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How to Win the Battle for Inbox Attention

Monday, December 17th, 2012

With email volume on the rise, social and mobile siphoning off subscribers’ time, and an increase in popularity of inbox management applications that make it easier for people to deal with email by kicking much of it to the curb before it even arrives, it is pretty clear that the battle for inbox attention is on.

Here are a few changes you can make to your email program today that will pay dividends in subscriber attention all year long:

1. Make a great first impression. The first email a new subscriber should receive is a triggered message confirming the new subscription or transaction. The performance of triggered messages is vastly superior to business-as-usual emails because it is the one time when you know your audience is attentive and even anticipating a message from you. We put a lot of energy into newsletters and promotions but because the open rates and click-throughs of triggered messages are multiples higher, using them effectively can yield a higher ROI. You have one opportunity to make a great first impression with a new subscriber. Use your confirmation email to set the tone for the rest of your email program: be engaging, include links to your social sites and leave them wanting more. Simply telling them in machine-speak that their subscription is confirmed not only squanders nearly perfect audience attention; it also loses you the chance to build on the momentum they’ve started by subscribing in the first place, which pays off in every subsequent message.

2. Trash the “All Subscribers” list. There is no message you can send to everyone on your list that will be relevant to them all. In fact, the more people you try to include, the less relevant the message becomes for each subscriber on it. So dump your “All Subscribers” list and put everyone instead into at least one segmented list. You know a lot about your subscribers already and now is the time to turn that knowledge into programmatic action. Even if someone has just joined your list, put them into a “New Subscribers” segment for the first 3 months and focus on introductory offers and educational content that teaches them about your brand and content.

3. Reserve the best content for email. There is a remarkable case study about how an electronics retailer named ZAGG identifies the best content before putting it in email. The company starts with a blog and posts 25-35 times every week. Each post is then posted out to its Twitter audience of 30K followers a couple of times. The posts that generate the most retweets and replies qualify for a run on the company’s Facebook page in front of 200K fans. Then, only the best-performing content that generates the most likes, comments and shares has proven itself worthy of inclusion in the company’s emails. ZAGG clearly places an enormous value on its email program and is also taking the steps necessary to preserve and even grow that value. It knows the content its subscribers receive is the best the company has to offer, which ensures that subscriber attention to the email channel remains high. Email drives sales better than social channels, so it is critical to maintain an open connection with your audience in the inbox for when you really need to move the needle on revenues, conference registrations, memberships, or whatever else moves your business forward.

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How to Boost Your Email Engagement Metrics

Monday, October 8th, 2012

Normally I advise against aiming to boost a particular email metric, as trying to tilt a particular number can lead to some unstrategic decisions. For example, if a marketer wants a higher open rate he might resort to subject line gimmicks which can cause a temporary spike in the number of people who read a message, but ultimately erode attention or trust.

Engagement metrics – in particular the number of people who interact meaningfully with your message by reading it, clicking on a link or replying to a message – are rising in importance, however, and are beginning to have a meaningful impact on deliverability. Each ISP has a slightly different formula for how it incorporates engagement metrics into a message’s likelihood of being delivered to the inbox, but the executive summary of the similarities is that as the number of subscribers who actively interact with your email increases, the number of messages delivered straight to the inbox increases as well.

For this reason, part (not necessarily all) of your email strategy should be to move past delivering content that is relevant and anticipated, and actually capitalizing on your subscribers’ attention by soliciting some clicks and other measurable activity. Here are some tactics to consider:

Surveys and Polls: A message that asks for feedback through a survey or poll can score high on the engagement scale. It is a softer call-to-action than Buy Now, and also indicates that the brand is listening. For best results, construct a poll that will drive responses your subscribers will be interested in, not just a frivolous survey that might work on Facebook where the threshold for engagement is a little lower.

Videos: Videos are enormous drivers of engagement. While you can not embed them into email with good results, you can nevertheless feature them in email with a large screenshot that looks like the video player, which launches the video page when clicked. Roll videos out on Facebook first to see which get the best response before dedicating an email to one.

Representative Photo from an Online Gallery or Album: If you include a picture in your email, your subscribers will look at it. If you indicate that it is one from many in an album (from the last conference or an industry dinner, or a behind-the-scenes photo shoot, etc.) they will click on it to see the rest of the gallery.

Hyperlink the word “LOLcats”: I wish I were kidding about this one but at the same time I’m glad that I’m not. We had our monthly newsletter go out a few weeks ago, and one of the paragraphs excerpted this blog which happens to mention LOLcats and link to a picture of one. The clicks on that link alone tripled our regular click rate for newsletters. What was particularly interesting though is that the link was buried in the 5th paragraph well below the fold. All of the clicks indicated that we had our audience’s engagement all along, and that the link turned all of this attention into engagement-scoring action.

Have you had success with similar tactics? I’d love to hear what else you’ve found that turns attention into engagement.

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