Email marketing campaigns can’t just be spray and pray blasts as they need to engage your subscribers and advance the carefully crafted relationship you’ve been building with them since they first signed up. Engagement is the Holy Grail of email marketers as it is the essence of what constitutes success. Apply these top ten tips and turn your engagement strategy into a mega-engagement one!

1.Give thanks & give. Not every single missive has to be laser focused on marketing to obtain the bottom line results of sales, sales, and more sales. Email marketing is all about the relationship, so give your subscribers some thanks, and don’t stop there. Give them free goodies for their interaction with your brand and they’ll be converts for life.

2.Ask lots of questions. When you’ve integrated a question in your microcontent, you’ll capture the imagination of your customer as they’ll be trying to answer it in their heads. They will be compelled to read on in order to find out what the whole thing’s about and that will result in a marked uptick in your open rates.

3.The power of P.S. You can humanize your emails by the simple tactic of adding a P.S. to the bottom of it. Not only does it make it seem as if you wanted to throw in one more incentive at the last minute, but it will portray the impression that a real human being with failings actually wrote the email, not a marketing machine.

4.Write like a real person. While we’re on the subject of having your emails written by a real person, take that one step further to humanizing your copy by writing in a casual, informal, and friendly manner. You’re not writing a doctoral thesis here, but at the same time, don’t let your writing degrade into using excessive slang or (gasp!) using incorrect spelling or improper grammar.

5.Deadlines always work. Any Call To Action (CTA) worth its salt has to have a deadline integrated into it or it will just wilt away on the vine. There’s no point informing your customer that you want them to proceed to checkout or to take a particular action unless you add that they have to do it by Tuesday at 3 pm!

6.Tell them clearly. Some email marketers are afraid of offending their customers if they tell them what to do in the CTA but that’s a completely counter-productive approach. Don’t treat your subscribers like idiots, but make sure that the CTA is extremely clear, straightforward, and doesn’t leave any room for confusion or misinterpretation.

7.Subscribe to lots of emails. It may seem absurd to ask email marketers to subscribe to other brands’ emails but that is the best way to understand what the current status quo is in the marketplace and to get great ideas that you can implement in your own campaigns. After all it never hurts to learn from the masters!

8.Mighty Math Powers. Take a page from the tiny superheroes at Umizoomi and immerse yourself in numbers. There have been volumes written about the psychology of reading and how having a number in numerical form rather than spelled out seems to arrest the eye. So never write out a number in full when you can include the digits only!

9.They know their names. Don’t overwork the personalization to the point where it sounds like your mail merge has gone into a severely hyperthyroid state. A couple of times in each email will allow your customer to recognize that the email is indeed personalized without having it come off as creepy and stalkerish.

10.Back off boogaloo. Is there really any email subscriber who will welcome into their inbox with open digital arms your third email of the day? Unless they’re the kind of over-enthusiastic brand fanatic who has already tattooed your brand name on their arms or chest, they’re going to look at it as a very spammy move. Only email when you have something important to say!

Integrate these tips into your campaigns and keep a close eye on your zooming metrics!