More From Less - How to Boost Engagement

You might be wondering why you have low opens, click-throughs and engagement. Let’s look at the basics of how to optimize emails for your vegan brand.

Can We Boost Our Open Rate?

The inbox is the “great equalizer”, giving everyone the same few limited slots to make their pitch: the sender name, subject line and preheader text. 

The sender name seems like a shoo-in. But while it may come as a surprise, one of the biggest inbox frustrations people have is that they don’t know who an email is from. That can happen when a subscriber forgot who you are, or an email is sent from a personal address (which is also a spam flag). It's usually best to say “[name] from [your brand]”. As long as your brand is clearly identifiable, you’re set up for success. It’s also a good idea to test company emails like info@, contact@, or a friendlier hello@ against a person’s professional email. But sending addresses with a person’s name can seem more personal and often get higher open rates.

The real saga happens in the battle of the subject lines. Standing in line with hundreds of other emails, your subject line must convince your time-poor, distracted reader to click. For this reason, it strongly impacts your open rate. And while in the past simply standing out was tactic enough, these days it must also be deeply relevant to your reader. To achieve this high-level of relevance you can flex your creative genius, but you can also rely on data to guide you to open-rate victory. (More on using data below). Try experimenting with personalization, curiosity, scarcity, and questions to craft high performing subject lines.

Preheader text is that blurb that email clients provide to show what the email contains before you open it. A lot of senders blow off preheader text. Don’t do that - always use preheader text. A good preheader backs up the subject line and helps improve low open rates. Take a close look at your email and dig out the most intriguing, value-driven aspects. Why should people read it? Summarize that into a captivating preheader between 85 and 100 characters.

What Drives Top Performing Click Through Rates and Engagement?

Simplicity in email leads to more conversions. While having a lot of choices might be helpful when it comes to product offerings, in the context of email: less is more. Marketers like to sound fancy by calling this, “reducing the cognitive load”. In English, this means bite-size emails that are skimmable, have one clear message, and are grounded in clean design. By contrast, what you don’t want is an email with lots of links, multiple calls to action, many different fonts, and a lot of long, homogeneous text blocks.

Your email must be easy to ingest and digest. Doing this well is a matter of both content and design.

How to Design for Results

Design comes first, and these days, design starts with the device. Since about half of all emails are read on mobile, it’s important that your emails are optimized for smartphones. A foundational basic is making sure that your images and text are easy to see on a small device. This is especially true for call to action buttons and text within images. Use responsive email templates that read well across device types. And make sure to test visual presentation outside of email builders by sending yourself a sample email and opening it on a range of devices. This is important, as good, mobile responsive design is no longer an option.

When it comes to design, intentionality is key. Always create a clear hierarchy. An effective email uses design to quickly and effortlessly guide the reader to the most important information and the action you want them to take. To build a visual route for their eyes, it’s important to know how to use negative space. For example, using it around a headline or a call to action can pool your viewers attention around this area and communicate importance.

Likewise, it’s best that the design be clean. For that reason, it’s recommended to limit yourself to no more than to two fonts. You can use headers, subheads, and regular text to prioritize different parts of content. Likewise, you can tastefully bold or italicize for emphasis.

These principles are often brought together in the inverted pyramid layout. The inverted pyramid is a way to structure elements of your email (headers, images, text, buttons) so that they draw the reader through the hierarchy. Emails following this framework start with a clear headline, then present supporting information and imagery and conclude with a prominent call to action. The inverted pyramid leads the reader's eyes (and mind) through the steps you want them to take.

What Content is Engaging?

Your main goal is to make it easy for busy people to absorb your message. For that reason, it’s strongly advised to limit emails to a single call to action. Decide on one goal for each email and make that the focus.

To keep things fresh, let your brand’s personality shine through. Whether your tone is quirky or thoughtful, don’t hold back on being original when you deliver your message. But remember, well-written email comes together at the intersection of minimalism and essentialism, so make sure your message is not just original but relevant.

Being relevant, however, can feel pretty elusive if you’re just guessing what your readers find important. Thankfully, you can create consistently pertinent emails using data. Do this by insightfully segmenting your audience and personalizing your emails to target specific groups. That’s one of email’s most defining features - the ability to tailor direct, personal communication to narrow segments of your audience.

To do this well, you need to know how to read the data and interpret it into actionable insights. It’s likely that you’re sitting on a goldmine of customer preferences and habits, waiting to be discovered and addressed. Which brings us to data-etiquette. It can be hard to strike the right tone between being personal and overstepping privacy appetites. Finding the line between pleasantly anticipating your customers needs and being downright creepy can be challenging. Start small until you understand your data and can put those insights to work in a helpful way.

People’s attention spans are increasingly shorter and their filters for relevance are increasingly stronger. It’s more necessary than ever to optimize your emails so the messages you put out have the results you need coming in.