With our new email composer, we hope that our clients find new and exciting ways to engage members, promote new activities, and run NPS campaigns. The email composer makes creating customizable templates, images, and calls to action simple and fun to use. We recently spoke to our community managers, who work closely with our clients to optimize community insights, and they shared tried and tested best practices for email community engagement and increasing activity completion rates.
Know Your Audience
Identify your core audience and strategically speak to them through email copy. Don’t underestimate the power of personalization. Try and include the customer’s name in the subject headline and create a dialogue that feels as if it is a one-on-one conversation. Just like you receive a barrage of emails a day, know that your clients experience the same thing. Try, in as little words as possible, to be as inviting and as unique as possible. Words such as “we,” “you,” and “us” gives the appearance of an established relationship.
Closing the Feedback Loop
We cannot emphasize enough the benefits of closing the feedback loops. Not only is this a wonderful way to thank costumers for providing their insights, but using this as an engagement tool shows a genuine concern and interest for community members. Closing the feedback loop can be as simple as sharing data from survey results, sharing business decisions that were made in part because of the community, or letting them know that, in some way, you are proactively using their insights. This practice helps solidify a client and business relationship that produces commitment.
Promote Member Curated Content
We’ve noted that one of the most resourceful and fruitful engagement tools are activities that promote conversations between members and allow them to create their own discussions. One of our clients shared with us that when they didn’t have any activities to run, they would simply ask fun questions to community members to get to know them better. This ended up providing them with ideas for new activities and even gave them editorial ideas for content pieces. Our advice: let your members interact with one another. What you think might be casual fodder, could easily end up giving insight and direction into questions you didn’t think to ask in the first place.
Limit linked activities
We recommend our members link no more than 3 activities in one email. Most members will not go back to the original email to do more than one activity. You almost cannibalize your activities when you do this, so we suggest keeping emails as focused as possible. Any activities that are new should be linked at the top and expectations should be clearly written and set.
Incentivize when appropriate
Your clients are here to benefit you! Providing them with incentives promotes and rewards engagement. Some of our highest performing emails are ones that include headlines such as “Earn 500 points…” “15-dollar reward…” and “Did you win your reward?” The caveat naturally being that you must provide and follow up with the promised incentive.
Emphasize your rewards program
Lastly, and on the same note of our previous point, make sure to make your rewards program clear. If you update your rewards program or want to emphasize how many points your members will receive by doing an activity, make sure that you include a rewards system reminder. One of the easiest ways to do this is to link the rewards FAQ.
For more email best practice tips, check out our other blogs linked here and here.