Unraveling Tips and Tricks to Increase Your Marketo Engagement Score!

While the acquisition of new subscribers should, no doubt, be one of your topmost priorities, one thing that you must juggle with it in order to ensure that your revenue generation doesn’t lose steam is the engagement of existing contacts. With the competition in the market getting increasingly stiff every day, getting your target audience to pay attention to you has become more of an uphill task than ever. However, thanks to marketer-friendly tools like Marketo, one has robust metrics at their disposal to reliably gauge audience engagement and effect strategic changes accordingly. What are we talking about? Why, the Marketo engagement score, of course!

Based on a proprietary algorithm that considers engaged behavior, the engagement score (on a scale of 0-100) helps you understand the efficacy of your email content. As you might have already guessed, a high Marketo engagement score is indicative of an email campaign that is firing on all cylinders. But the question is, what measures can you take to ensure that this score never ceases to be formidable? That’s exactly what we answer in this blog! Today, we will walk you through a host of techniques that will help you consolidate your engagement score, thereby ensuring that your business perches itself head and shoulders above its competitors. Excited to discover what’s in store? Let’s go!

Make Your Welcome Emails Pitch-perfect

While there are a multitude of reasons why you should focus on crafting your welcome emails with great care and attention, the one we wish to bring to your attention is this: 76% of people expect a welcome email. This is absolutely monumental in an environment where email fatigue is rampant, and thus, convincing subscribers to pay attention to your email campaigns demands serious effort (and then some more). Welcome emails are sent to subscribers in a phase when they are already curious about your brand and are eager to find out more about your offerings; for this reason, they register far higher open rates in comparison to regular marketing emails. 

Therefore, welcome emails that hit all the right notes allow you to capitalize on this excitement, enabling you to foster secure customer relationships. After all, the merit of a stunning first impression can never be doubted, can it? Given below are a few pointers that will allow you to ace your welcome email campaigns:

• Keep things simple. Welcome emails aren’t meant to generate revenue; they exist to express your gratitude to your new subscribers, give them a glimpse of your offerings, and nudge them into exploring various aspects of your brand. 
• Look to align your welcome email copy with your brand identity. While a welcome email might be the first piece of communication that a fresh subscriber will receive from you, it might not necessarily be their first instance of engaging with you; there’s a very strong chance that they would have already browsed through your website or social media accounts and have an idea of your brand personality. So, should there be a discrepancy between your brand tone and your welcome email copy, it can be jarring to your new subscribers. 
• Offer a reward to new subscribers. It could be anything ranging from a discount code to free shipping for their first purchase. It’s a great way of thanking them for signing up for your brand and can fetch you a lot of brownie points.
• Make sure to clearly highlight the unsubscribe link in your welcome email. Part of extending a warm welcome to your new subscribers also includes giving them the autonomy to opt out of your communications.

Monitor the Hygiene of Your Email List

Being scrupulous toward maintaining the hygiene of your email list is extremely critical for ensuring a high engagement score. Regularly eliminating inactive and invalid contacts from your list is essential for increasing your email deliverability and protecting your sender reputation. Besides, it also makes sure that the hard yards you put behind curating your email campaigns receive the attention (and generate the revenue) they thoroughly deserve.

Listed below are some list management techniques to help you stay on top of your game.

• Using Smart Lists in Marketo you can easily assess the number of invalid emails coming in from each source and effect suitable changes accordingly.
• Employ single and double opt-ins while adding contacts to your email list. Consequently, this requires you to judiciously design your opt-in forms in the first place. At the outset, ensure that the opt-in form has as few data input fields as possible; greater number of fields translate to greater disinterest at the user’s end. Additionally, you must always be transparent with your opt-in form incentives. Don’t promise something you can’t eventually provide simply for the sake of gaining a signup. 
• Marketo enables you to score your leads on the basis of their engagement, offering you clarity regarding their buying readiness; this goes a long way towards helping you craft targeted campaigns for them. 
• Engage mindfully with your dormant subscribers. Take stock of every possible reason that might have pushed these contacts to be unengaged from your emails. And then, allow this reflection to inform the targeted re-engagement campaigns you will design to win them back. Still, if these data-backed concerted efforts fail to fetch any sort of success, consider removing these subscribers from your list. 
• Segment your email list- divide your contacts into different sections on the basis of various parameters such as age, location, gender, interests, past purchases, and the like. Email list segmentation holds the key to fashioning personalized and relevant messages for your customers, increasing your likelihood of eliciting a response from them. You can utilize Segmentation in Marketo to accomplish the same. This will make adding dynamic content to your emails highly convenient for you. 
• Encourage your subscribers to configure the frequency with which they want to receive emails from you. This will essentially keep you from overwhelming your contacts with your emails and instead have them looking forward to hearing from you. 

Get Your Email Timing Spot On

Even when your email content ticks all the right boxes, you’ll struggle to score well on the engagement front should your email timing be off. With timing being an incredibly subjective affair, it is a rather tough nut to crack. While you are obviously encouraged to refer to surveys and studies put out by reputable publications to stay abreast of the latest trends, at the end of the day, what will empower you to formulate a winning strategy is a careful reading of the unique habits of your subscribers. 

Here are a few things you can do to get your email timing right:

• Obtain a thorough understanding of your audience’s demographics; it is arguably the most critical criterion governing email timing. With Smart Lists in Marketo, you can obtain a clear understanding of how audiences across different demographics are engaging with a particular campaign. Once you know what’s working (and what’s not) for each of them, you can effectively optimize your efforts. 
• Keep track of your email frequency. While you certainly don’t want to bombard your subscribers’ inboxes with constant emails, you also don’t want to disengage them by sending an email every once in a blue moon. Given how difficult it can be to decide the ideal frequency on your own, the best course of action, as mentioned above, is to let subscribers themselves set their own frequency.
• Account for seasonal changes while defining the send time of your email campaigns. 

Test and Repeat

As an email marketer, you always want to send out that version of your email campaign that resonates best with the overwhelming majority of your subscribers. But how do you determine that? How else, but A/B testing! Moreover, you also need to check if your email is rendering as desired across various devices and environments (with mobile users perpetually on the rise, you stand to lose a great deal should your campaigns fail to be mobile-optimized). A rule of thumb while conducting A/B testing is to focus on one variable at a time. This lets you go about things in an organized manner and tabulate your findings more systematically, too. And spare no element in your template from testing- be it the preheader text, subject line, CTA, email footer, or images, assess each and everyone’s merit before finalizing them. The more rigorous you are with testing, the more actionable insights you will have at your disposal to optimize your email campaigns. 

Prepare a Robust Email Campaign Report 

You must strive to up your game with every email that you send out; this is vital for keeping your audience engaged. However, continuous optimization of your campaigns can only be made possible by meticulously monitoring their performance. And that, in turn, warrants a foolproof email campaign report. 

Listed below are the metrics that you must track to effectively evaluate the performance of your campaigns. 

• Clickthrough rate: A faithful indicator of the kind of interaction and engagement your email content is driving, you’d always want your clickthrough rate to lean toward the higher side.
• Bounce rate: A measure of the total number of emails that failed to reach your recipient’s inbox, a high bounce rate is indicative of a subpar email list quality.
• Conversion rate: A count of the total number of subscribers who completed the desired action against the link attacked in your email, monitoring the conversion rate gives you clarity regarding your ROI.
• List growth rate: By helping you understand the pace at which you are acquiring new leads, this metric gives you an insight into the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts.
• Unsubscribe rate: If your unsubscribe rate is high, treat it as a wake-up call for your email content and get to work revamping it at the earliest.

Marketo allows you to create comprehensive email performance reports where you can monitor vital parameters such as hard and soft bounces, clicked links, unsubscribes, and the like. 

Wrapping It Up

Ensuring engagement across your email campaigns demands consistent efforts, unwavering discipline, and generous amounts of perseverance. We hope the insights shared above will help you prevent your Marketo engagement score from faltering and keep yourself a step ahead of your competition, always!