Engaging subscribers

On Friday I talked about using clicks and opens as a way to monitor recipient engagement and dropping recipients who do not interact after a certain period of time. One of the critical parts of this is that a sender must send mail that encourages recipients to click and then actually tracks clicks. If a sender does not send mail that encourages recipients to interact, then using interactions as a way to measure engagement does not work.
For some types of emails this is more difficult than others. One example is newsletters. Newsletters do not always encourage recipients to click through to read the full article and many readers will not click on ads. There are a couple ways around this.
One way is the way used by Ken Magill in his Magilla Marketing Newsletter. In his newsletter there are article slugs to 4 articles, but to see the whole article a reader must click through the link. Ken can quickly see which recipients are actively reading his newsletter by tracking clicks. By writing timely and interesting articles, Ken engages his readers into interacting with his newsletter in a way he can track.
Another way newsletter recipients can be encouraged to interact with the newsletter is demonstrated by the Minnesota Companion Rabbit Society. Their newsletters contain full articles but there have lots of links. These links encourage people to click through to the website to view pictures of cute bunnies, see more stories about the cute bunnies and discover more ways the reader can help save the cute bunnies. Joanna, President of the Minnesota Companion Rabbit Society, says that adding a fun link to emails encourages people to click. She tries to put one fun link (like Howard’s Big Dig) in every email. Give the readers something to pique their interest and they will click through.
For marketing and advertising messages, there are different pressures and partial slugs may not work. Generally, market email must stand on its own and should not rely on readers having to click through to get the full offer. Most marketers also do not have lots of pictures of cute bunnies to encourage readers to click through.  Buy our product or the bunny gets it will probably generate a lot of unwanted negative publicity for a company. But there are ways to provide interaction opportunities with recipients in ways that allow senders to track the interaction. Discounts can work, or links to recommended products based on the recipient’s previous purchases. In this case it is not always about getting users to make a purchase, although that is a nice bonus, but just to click on something to indicate they are reading your mail.