8 Ways to Make Your Emails More Engaging
Erin
Co-Founder & Director
If you’re wondering how to make your emails more engaging, you’re in the right place.
We don’t say this just because we’re an agency that specialises in email marketing for eCommerce pet brands…but creating engaging, appealing and attention-grabbing emails is essential for any pet biz looking to increase their sales and influence.
A well-crafted email can help you to increase your brand visibility, build customer relationships, and increase conversions.
Don’t believe us? In 2022, Klaviyo users brought in $2.2B in revenue through email and SMS marketing. Which just goes to show how incredibly important and lucrative email marketing is for the modern pet brand.
So without further ado, here are 8 ways to make your emails more engaging.
1. Start with a catchy subject line
The subject line is the first thing a pet parent will see when your email lands in their inbox, so you gotta make it count.
A catchy subject line can be the difference between your audience opening or ignoring your emails, so it’s vital that your subject line is relevant, concise, and compelling.
You can use humour, intrigue, or urgency to grab a pet parent’s attention. Avoid using all caps, excessive punctuation, or “clickbait” subject lines – as these will all devalue your brand and also potentially land you in the dreaded spam folder.
Most importantly, keep your subject lines honest and straightforward.
2. Personalise your emails
Personalisation is the key to making your emails more engaging. It shows to pet parents that you’ve gone to the extra effort of tailoring your communication to ensure it’s relevant and interesting to them, as an individual.
For example, a quick-win for personalisation is addressing your recipient by their name to help build rapport and familiarity.
With the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system – like Klaviyo – you can also use their past interactions with your pet brand or purchase history to tailor your messaging and email content.
Likewise, you can also segment your email list based on demographics, interests, or behaviour to send more targeted emails.
For instance, if you sell a puppy variation of your product, you can send this customer tailored content to do with caring for a young canine. This will be a very different approach to a customer who purchased a senior variation of your product.
Ultimately, personalisation can help you to build stronger and more loyal relationships with your audience, increase “know, like and trust” in your brand whilst boosting conversions.
3. Write for your audience
When it comes to making your emails more engaging, you’ve got to keep your audience’s interests, wants or needs at the forefront of anything you create.
In other words, take the time to get to know your audience on a more intimate level and create your email content accordingly.
Tailor your language, tone, and style to match who you’re addressing. For example, some audiences may prefer being called “pet parents” over “fur mum/dad”. Some may prefer a fun, engaging approach whilst others may prefer a more serious, educational approach.
Certain groups may only be interested in content geared to a specific breed of dog/cat. Other audiences may be receptive to a broader variety of topics.
Use accessible language and avoid jargon or technical terms. Humour and storytelling can also be incorporated, where appropriate.
Essentially, you want to make sure that your email is easy to read and understand. It won’t take much for pet parents to disengage and click away from your email, so go for simple but effective over anything else.
4. Use visual elements
Visual elements such as images, videos, or gifs can again make your emails more engaging and eye-catching, whilst making your brand more memorable.
They can also help you convey your message quickly and effectively, whilst establishing a greater emotive connection with your pet parent audience. Gifs, for instance, can help add more personality to your content.
(In fact, you may want to check out this chat I had with pet photographer, Emily Abrahams of Inspawration Photography, on How to Capture Great Photography For Your Pet eCommerce Business.)
Relevant, high-quality visuals can be the difference between a pet parent being sceptical and actually trusting your brand.
However, our tip is not to overdo it. Ensure there’s a balance between the images to text ratio, as large image, video and gif file sizes can impact on the deliverability and performance of your emails – making their load time slower on certain devices.
(Pixelated/fuzzy images can also devalue your brand. So keep an eye out for that.)
Visuals should be used strategically and purposefully, and they should be optimised for both desktop and mobile. Ensure you create a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes, that your fonts are legible and buttons are easy to locate.
(It’s reported that nearly 40% of Aussie users open emails on their mobile phones. So it’s crucial to ensure your design adapts well to different screen sizes.)
5. Keep it short and sweet
Most of us receive hundreds of emails every day, which is why it’s so important that your emails are designed to be as succinct, appealing and attention-grabbing (whilst remaining value-driven) as they can possibly be.
Avoid using long paragraphs or complicated sentences. A lengthy and complex email can quickly lose a pet parent’s attention or feel like “hard work” to get through – again causing your audience to lose interest and disengage with your emails.
Do this frequently enough and your audience will soon come to associate your emails with sucking up a lot of time and attention, to the point where pet parents are completely discouraged from opening your emails.
Make your email to the point and optimised for accessibility. Ideally, make it scannable and ensure it has a clear call-to-action – i.e. what #1 action you want pet parents to take from your email.
(This could be purchasing a specific product, opening and reading a blog, or some other action that will help to build your website traffic or lead to increased conversions.)
Top tip: Use bullet points or numbered lists to break up your text and make it more readable.
6. Add value
As we mentioned in the previous point, your emails need to be value-driven.
Sending an email for the sake of sending an email is setting yourself up to fail. You need to give pet parents a reason to want to engage with your email; it needs to be more than just a sales pitch for your product.
The goal with every email should be to add value to your audiences’ life and to build trust in your brand.
In our previous blog, we discussed the 4 Types of Value you can offer pet parents. So our advice? Make sure you include one or more of each type of value in every email you send out.
7. Create a sense of urgency
We all know the feeling…if a task deadline is a month away, we’re not as motivated to complete it versus if this task deadline is within the next twenty-four hours.
Your pet parent audience is in the same boat. They won’t feel a sense of urgency to take action from your emails unless you put that pressure on them to do so.
For example, you can use time-sensitive offers or limited-time promotions to create a sense of urgency.
You can also use scarcity (“last few remaining!”) or social proof (“look at all the other pet parents enjoying this wonderful product. Don’t you want to join in?”) to encourage action.
Just make sure that your sense of urgency is genuine and not manipulative, as otherwise this can damage audience trust in your authenticity as a pet brand.
8. Test and optimise
When all is said and done, the only way to make your emails truly more engaging is by testing different approaches.
Making assumptions about what your audience likes or will best respond to is like wearing a blindfold and taking a scattergun approach.
That’s why it’s important to split test different aspects of your emails. So you can gather concrete data and insights into your audience behaviour.
For example, you can test:
- Subject lines
- Message Content
- Visuals
- Calls to action
- Time emails are sent
- Day emails are sent
If using a CRM like Klaviyo, you can use analytics to monitor how your emails perform and identify what approaches your pet parent audience best respond to.
Perhaps they prefer lifestyle images over plain product images. Maybe they’re more likely to open your email if the subject line has emojis in it. Potentially, they might prefer the call to action to be positioned higher up the email than towards the end.
The only way you’ll be able to identify this is through split testing and continuing to optimise your email content over time.
And remember to repeat split tests several times to ensure the results are accurate and not just a fluke.
So there you have it, 8 ways to make your emails more engaging. We hope you’ve found these tips useful, but they’re really top-level concepts to get you started.
There’s so much you can do to strengthen your email marketing strategy. If you would like to talk to our team about the next steps for your own pet biz emails, we’re always happy to discuss how we can help you.
Just book in for a call with us and we’ll take it from here.