Emails That Click: Fun, Engaging Ways to Spark Your Subscribers to Take Action - Lynley Hipps

Website: lynleyhipps.com

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00:00 Hey y'all, I'm Linley Hipps, I'm an email marketing strategist and today we're going to talk about emails that click real strategies that you can use right now to encourage a subscriber subscribers to take action in your emails to boost your engagement without fancy tech. So first of all, why does engagement matter why do we care about engagement? Well, passive emails lead to passive subscribers so if you're not encouraging your subscribers to interact with you through email they're just consuming, if they're doing that at all. 

00:34 And they're not participating in this relationship, if you will, even if your open rate is high and this is 1 hear all the time, oh, but I have such a great open rate. It's really not indicative of the engagement you're actually getting in your emails because of Apple Mail, privacy Protection and other things that these inbox providers are doing to protect the customer but make it harder on us small business owners. So open rates do not indicate engagement. Clicks and replies are what indicate engagement. So that's what we need to be asking for. Because if we don't ask them for what we want, then we're not going to get what we want. 

01:19 So what makes an email engaging? Well, really it's about giving your subscribers something to do, giving them something to click on, giving them something to choose or asking them for a response that allows them to interact with your emails in a meaningful way. And because the whole goal of email marketing is building trust and relationship, the more that they interact with you, the more likely they are to take that next step with you, whether it's, you know, join your coaching program or buy your low ticket offer or whatever, right. 

01:55 So how you benefit from engagement is multiple fold. From a technical perspective, the more clicks and replies you get, the better your deliverability and your inbox placement will be, which means more people will see your emails, which of course then leads to more engagement and more sales. But it's also a great way for you to learn what your subscribers want and need from you right now. So that allows you to deliver more relevant content and more offers that would appeal to the subscribers on your list right now. And engagement helps build trust and connection faster. And that's really what we want that is the whole goal of email marketing. 

02:40 So today we're going to talk about four different strategies for engaging emails. Now, these are strategies that you can implement in a number of ways we'll talk about tech in just a minute, but it's less about how you implement them and more about the purpose behind why you were asking the question or giving them the the opportunity to give you feedback, right? So the first type is click check. And a click check is a great way for you to get sort of quick in the moment kind of feedback, obviously, while boosting your click through rates and, and, and helping them feel more involved in what you're doing. 

03:20 So, for example, on the left, even if you're not a social media manager, that doesn't matter. If you find out by asking this click check question that most of your followers, most of your subscribers are spending their time on Instagram, that may indicate that you want to post more on Instagram you may want to, you know, focus on that as opposed to LinkedIn or Threads, Right On the right is an example from the email of a friend of mine her name is Beth and she is a kit expert, formerly convert kit and she was working on the training and she's, she was struggling with what to name that training. 

03:59 So she asked her email list. She sent out an email, hey what, which of these titles do you like better? And the results came back. She told us the next day that tagging made simple was the overwhelming choice. And that's something with when you're asking for feedback like this, the more you can let them know the results of the poll or or vote or whatever it is that you've asked for the better and then the fact that you implement it means that they have a more vested interest now in this course because they helped named it, they helped name it. 

04:40 It makes them feel like they're a part of you, your community, your business, your content. The second type of strategy that we're going to talk about is a subscriber snapshot and really this is a great way for you to get specific information about your audience that you can use to guide content and offers. So I personally ask all the time, what email marketing platform do you use? And it's not that I have preferences over email over particular email platforms it's that if I know that most of my audience uses Mailer Lite, that tells me that I need to spend more time focusing on Mailer Lite and implementing different activities, different functionality within the Mailer Lite. 

05:27 If I don't have anybody on my list that's an active campaign, then I don't need to focus on active campaign. Another example here on the right is one that I sent out to get an idea of where my folks were in terms of their primary struggle. I focus on email, strategy copy, and tech so where do you struggle most now most of them said D all of the above, but I gave them the opportunity to just reply back with a letter. You don't have to write me a novel. 

05:56 You don't even have to write strategy, copy, or tech. You can just write me the letter, send it to me and that allows me to see where folks are struggling most so I can create content for that particular area. Now, one of the great, great things was because this was a reply email where I asked for their response. Most of those folks that responded then went on to tell me why it was they struggled with this or how long they've been struggling with this or you know, any other conversation opener that allowed me to then reply back and say, you know, hey, I've got content for this or Oh my gosh, I didn't know you were struggling with that. 

06:33 Let me help you with that, right? Gives you that opportunity, that open conversation loop to then serve them them more effectively. The personal pathway strategy is one that you can use to allow your subscribers to really self identify where they are sort of in your journey, what step they're in, in your customer journey, where they are in their journey with you know your topics so for my example, you know on the right, where are you in your list building journey and this is a question I ask frequently of my email list. 

07:08 Haven't started my email list yet. Have a list, but I don't really email consistently. I email consistently and I'm actively growing my list or I am ready to take it to the next level. When I ask this question, what it allowed me to do is it allowed me to see that most of my subscribers who responded, and if they responded, that means they're paying attention to what you have to offer so I'm going to listen to what they want, right? It allowed me to see that most of my subscribers win those first two categories, which then told me, Lindly, you need to spend more time talking about how to get started with your email list. 

07:47 Not just once you have an email, list how to do XY and Z, The example on the right, you know, where are you in your style journey? You know, if you are, if you get a lot of answers where people don't know where to start, they're overwhelmed, then you can share tips for getting out of that overwhelm, right? Or if you get people who are saying I am ready to level up my personal brand, that might be a great opportunity for you to reach out to them and say, hey, I can help you with this here, you know, is my coaching offer or whatever. 

08:25 And finally, the fourth strategy we're going to talk about is Content Compass. And this really allows the subscriber to choose the content that they most want or need right now. And the key to this is linking this content, sorry, linking each of the options to a piece of content you've already created. So not only are you getting information about the kind of content there people are looking for, you are giving them that content with just a click. So the on the right, the question that I asked, do any of these common email marking questions resonate with you? I have a small list of how do I grow it, which email sequences do i need etcetera. 

09:08 All of those options link to a piece of content that answers that question same similarly on the left, you know, where do you struggle most with meta ads? And you know, there are a number of things that people could be struggling with so if they say I am struggling specifically with creative and I can supply them with tips, tricks, processes to help them get their creative, their ad creative ready to go without consternation, then that that delivers a solution to them immediately and they have control over that so if they're not concerned about budgeting, they don't have to see content about budgeting. 

09:52 So those are our four types of of interactions or strategies for engagement. Click check subscriber snapshot personal pathway and content compass and which the type of strategy you use really depends on the what you are aiming to get out of that, right so in some ways, start with the end in mind What what do you want to learn about your subscriber situation, right? Ask a subscriber subscriber snapshot question. If you want to get more traffic to your content that you've already created, a content compass email would be great. 

10:31 So this chart will help you determine where you want or what kind of engagement strategy to put into place based on your needs and your own business. Now, I mentioned a little note about tech. Tech is one of the questions that people have most about this concept of engagement emails. How do I make this happen in my platform? Well, the easiest way to do it is just to reply. Ask them to reply. Will you get a ton of replies? Probably not at first, but the more you ask, the more people will probably get in the habit of replying to you. 

11:07 You can use it depending on the email platform you use. You can use things like link click actions or trigger links to tag them to update a custom field to put them into an automation. You can use it to help segment them so you can send specific information to the people who you know identified that they are interested in XY or Z. And then also in your email marketing platforms, there are a lot of, a lot of them have interactive email elements that you could put into place. The example from my friend Bev about the the best name for her next course. 

11:44 She is a kit partner, formerly convert kit and she used a pole element within kit. And so there are a lot of opportunities depending on the platform that you use or there are ways to or to make the platform do what you're trying to, to get it to do. And if you are ready to start really focusing on engaging your emails, engaging your subscribers with email, I hope you'll glad grab my Click to connect guide. 

12:16 You can get it at lilyhips dot com slash click. And in it it goes. It gives you a quick overview of all of these, these different strategies. But what's really helpful is it gives you different kinds of questions to ask based on industry. And so you can focus on those particular questions wherever you are, whatever you do, and it will help you get into creating these these more engaging emails. So I hope you'll check it out if you ever have any questions about email marketing or anything like that. I am available on all the platforms i'm Lindley Hipps, I'm the only one out there, so I'm pretty easy to find. I hope you enjoyed this session and I hope you will take some time to really figure out how you can make your emails more engaging, both for your benefit and for your subscribers. 

13:05 I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you have a great rest of the summit.