Are Your Contacts Engaged with Your Content? There’s an Automation for That.

About six months ago I signed up for a business newsletter. I had the intention of reading it everyday, and for a while I kept that up.

Eventually though, life got the best of me.

Things got busy and the newsletter just fell to the wayside. It was nothing personal. Life happened.

The newsletter sent “We Miss You” emails, but nothing gave.

Have you ever been in that situation?

Gauge interest with tagging and segmenting

That scenario is one of the many challenges of being a marketer or business owner. Especially when you are competing with the many newsletters or content variations that exist today.

So, as a marketer or business owner, how do you determine a subscriber is inactive or unengaged with your content? In turn, determining the level of engagement of your contacts.

Matt Fox in our automation sharing thread, in the ActiveCampaign Community, had a great solution for determining a contact’s interest; tagging and segmenting.

The automations he shared automatically records the recency of the clicks and opens for his customers.

Matt does so by applying tags to “more engaged” contacts and “less engaged” contacts.

These tags are based on the time passed since the contact last opened or clicked the campaign (email).

Check out these two previous blog posts covering advanced engagement tracking withlead scoring and tagging.

Once the tag is applied, you can easily segment your list.

So, in the above example of contact engagement, you might want to segment your listsbased on “less engaged” contacts and “more engaged” contacts.

Level of engagement is a huge factor in deliverability

Determining if your contacts are “less engaged” or “more engaged” will hugely help your deliverability; a way to measure the success of getting a campaign into a subscriber’s inbox.

Why does engagement play such a large role in deliverability? In a recent news release by Return Path, the President George Bilbrey dives into this:

“More than ever before, subscriber engagement is critical to getting your email delivered to the inbox. Major mailbox providers like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are constantly looking for ways to improve their customer experience, and they are increasingly reliant on engagement signals to filter out unwanted messages,”

The question then becomes; what can you do to be sure you have subscriber engagement? Manage your subscriber lists better.

In a blog about delivery improvement, it’s noted that about 30% of addresses become invalid, or churn, in a year.

List churn exists. And list management, will help you address the churn and allow for a more effective email marketing program overall.

Thus, segmenting your lists by “less engaged” and “more engaged” allows you to better nurture your leads and ensure deliverability of the message you wanted them to receive.

Nurture your leads once you know their interest level

So, once you know which contacts are engaged based on your tags and segments; what do you do?

Now, you want to interact with and nurture those contacts accordingly.

To achieve this you can send a nurture track or a series of engaging emails.

The thing to remember is… what is the goal of nurturing these specific contacts?

Are you trying to re-engage the contacts? Inform them about your business? Warm them up to a specific product?

There is no right or wrong answer here. But, it’s critical to keep in mind the goal and purpose of sending the nurture track.

Without keeping in mind the goal, you aren’t going to be as effective in your message or add value to your contacts. You will just be adding noise, to their already noisy lives.

So, for “less engaged” contacts you might consider sending a re-engagement automation.

For instance, check out the re-engagement automation below for download:

By using automations and nurture tracks with engagement tags and segments you will be able to nurture your leads based on their specific level of engagement and interest.

This will allow for an overall higher level of engagement and re-engagement of your contacts.

Personalize your message based on level of engagement

By knowing your contacts interest level, you can then personalize your message even further based on engagement.

One way to personalize your message is by empathizing with your contacts. The better we can empathize and understand their needs, the better nurture tracks we will customize for them to travel down.

Taking into consideration their level of engagement while personalizing the message, we can create a higher likelihood of engaging them further. Which means we can provide more value to our engaged contacts.

We can not forget that life happens. As marketers and business owners we can do a better job. Specifically, we can do a better job interacting with our contacts.

This will result in more engaging content for them and more business for you. Win-win.

Better engage with your contacts for free today. No credit card required. 14 day trial.