How to make your email marketing engaging to millennials

Millennials spend about six hours a day checking email, according to Adobe. Marketers have the opportunity to capitalize on the amount of time millennials spend reading their emails and maximize their email marketing efforts. But how?

To make an impact among millennials, marketers need to break the mold, focus their attention and put the recipients in control of the content they receive.

Break the mold

Over 215 billion emails are sent every day, according to Radicati, and that number is only going to increase over time. Marketers need to set themselves apart from the masses to increase open and engagement rates, especially among millennials.

To do that, try using an emoji in the subject line, but only if it is true to your brand and recipients’ interests. Begin adding emojis to subject lines for a select group of recipients — for example, your most engaged ones — to see if the content resonates with them, and expand accordingly, depending on the response.

While the use of hashtags in subject lines may seem like a good idea to break the mold, it may decrease your engagement. The average engagement rate for subject lines with a hashtag is only 10.5 percent (compared with 17.2 percent for subject lines that don’t contain a hashtag).

Don’t be afraid to try something new in your subject line to catch millennials’ attention, but try to keep it to three to seven words to see the greatest engagement.

Keep it short, but not too short

Millennials are notorious for having short attention spans and skipping to the end of things, hence the birth of the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) section at the end of a piece of content to recap what was said. But while easily digestible content is important, so is valuable content.

As of late, marketing emails are image-heavy and text-light. Images are an important and effective way to communicate, but don’t sacrifice value for space. If you provide valuable information for your readers, they will scroll for it.

Mobile plays a role in decreasing the size of email, but readers — including millennials — want to absorb the information they signed up to receive. Don’t be afraid to add more text if it brings value to the recipient.

Put millennials in the driver’s seat

Ask what your millennial recipients want to read and learn more about. Put them in control by asking for their opinion, and then delivering it. Millennials are open to sharing their information, but they want to be in control of their preferences. Allow them to set their email preferences, and honor them to gain and retain their trust.

Email marketers can pick up preferences of their subscribers by analyzing which subject lines are being opened the most frequently, which links are being clicked on most and which calls to action (CTAs) are enticing them to visit your website.

Use all of the behavior to test and send email so you can decipher what is the most interesting and what will engage your recipients the most.

TL;DR

There is a great opportunity in targeting millennials through email marketing campaigns, due to the amount of time they spend checking email. But it requires thinking outside the box, keeping their attention with valuable content and putting them in control of their email preferences.

Commitment to a brand may be scary for some millennials, but they want to know they can trust you as a sender. To build a long-term relationship with your millennial recipients, always provide value, and honor their preferences.

Don’t throw away the value in your messages to make them shorter or more visually pleasing. If you don’t provide value in your email, your recipients won’t be interested in receiving it anymore.

Keep testing to understand which content your subscribers enjoy and engage with the most, as this is what drives successful email marketing campaigns. Once you understand what your recipients want, that is when they begin to act on your CTAs and share with their friends.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Scott Heimes

Scott Heimes serves as Chief Marketing Officer at SendGrid, where he is responsible for the company's brand strategy, driving demand for its solutions and leading global marketing operations. Scott oversees corporate marketing, demand generation, corporate communications, partnerships and alliances, international expansion and SendGrid’s community development team.