Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

Email Engagement Checklist

While there isn’t a formula that’s going to ensure that your recipients engage with every email you send them, there are questions you can ask yourselfprior to sending your emailthatwillgiveagoodindication of your success:

• Is this the appropriate audience? I can’t stress the importance of audience enough. Sending to the wrong audience is like showing up at an email marketing conference and talking about chess. No one cares. You must spend the appropriate time defining the audience most likely to react. Then you must do the segmentation necessary to get to that audience.

  You should also ask yourself if you have permission to send emails to the audience. If you’re blasting off emails to every address in your CRM system and assuming, “Yes, these people want to hear from me!” you are wrong. And the response to your mailing will prove it (there will be an usually high percentage of bounced emails, ignored emails, and unsubscribes for non-permission campaigns).

• Is my message targeted, personalized, and relevant? Targeting goes hand-in-hand with proper audience identification. It also enables you to leverage what you know in order to personalize the message (e.g., “We know that you recently bought a new mattress and wanted to let you know that all of our bedding is 10% off”).

  Personalization will humanize your communications and draw attention to their relevancy. It includes everything from name to purchase history (I’ll note that name is an expected field and ...