When it comes to connecting with your customers, engagement is the language you need to know.
So, how can you become fluent in engagement quickly to get your emails opened and acted upon?
Following language school, Fluent City’s, tips on creating an engaged audience is a great place to start!
In addition to offering fun after-work language classes for adults in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington DC, Fluent City keeps their fans engaged across all four cities with their informative and fun email newsletters.
Practice these five phrases in your business’s email newsletter, and you’ll be communicating with your audience effectively, all while having some fun along the way:
1. “Hi, are you busy? We are too!”
If you want your email to stand a chance in a bustling inbox, you have to get your audience’s attention quickly. And you have to explain why your customers should act quickly as well.
Luckily, Fluent City’s Marketing Director, Mandy Menaker has a plan.
“We make sure that every time we send a newsletter out, we have something new to share,” Mandy explains. “Every newsletter should have some kind of new theme, whether it’s new classes, an event, or a survey. We want to make sure the newsletter is engaging and not just filling up someone’s inbox. ”
Let’s take a look at two of Fluent City’s recent subject lines:
- “New Spring Classes Announced – Spots Filling Up Quickly”
- “The Slang Workshop Giveaway Winner Is…”
With either of these email subject lines, Fluent City’s contacts know exactly what information will be shared and they can easily decide if it’s worth an open for them.
2. “We’re serious about you.”
Once you have your readers’ attention, it’s time to deliver quality content.
With so much information available online, your readers want to know that you’ve put the time in to send something useful to them.
“An email newsletter allows you to pick what the most important message is for your customers. We’re serious about our information being clear and straightforward. And we always double check to make sure that everything is accurate and without spelling errors,” Mandy says.
After you consistently show customers the value of reading your emails, they’ll start to become more loyal to you and your business.
In Mandy’s words: “Once people start to read your newsletters and know that they’re engaging, they’ll begin to look forward to opening them up because they know what to expect from you. They learn to trust you and the information you’re providing.”
3. “…but not too serious.”
Just because you’re serious about your information, doesn’t mean your newsletter has to have a serious tone.
“When it comes to the tone of our newsletters, we try to make it as casual as possible,” Mandy explains. “People like that we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”
To find the right tone for your newsletter, you have to have your audience in mind. For Fluent City, which caters to a younger crowd looking for a fun and laidback approach to learning, this means their emails have to be fun as well.
This can include a “Romance Language” themed newsletter for Valentine’s Day or a link to a hilarious video of a German professor’s improv rap in an event follow-up email.
“Our goal is always to get people to sign up for classes, but we don’t hesitate to put jokes in our emails,” says Mandy. “We want our newsletter to read like it’s coming from a friend and not just a sales ad.”
4) “You can find more here:”
You don’t have to try to include every piece of valuable information in your newsletter.
By including links to your website or buttons to your social media accounts, you will drive traffic to your other outlets and encourage customers to engage with you in more ways than one.
This is what Mandy has in mind each time she creates an email newsletter. “A newsletter is the perfect place to streamline all your channels into one place. We always feature recent blog posts, links to our class offerings, and buttons to all our social media sites. And we always see a giant jump in traffic after sending the newsletter out.”
5) “Now take the next step!”
An engaging email is a powerful tool to inspire action.
If you’ve provided readers with the right information and built up their trust with quality content that speaks to them, they’ll be ready to give back to you. Be sure you make it easy for them, by providing a clear call to action for each newsletter.
Of course, a little incentive never hurt either:
“This fall, we promoted a survey in our newsletter and kept the details really clear by saying ‘Fall Survey: One lucky winner will receive a free class. It only takes 5 minutes to fill out,’” Mandy recalls. “We received over 500 responses in a weekend. The feedback was so valuable to us and the positive responses are great for recruiting new customers.”
Combine these five tips in your next email to get your customers engaged long after the email is sent out. Becoming fluent in engagement means you’ll be building a strong community to speak your praises to communities of their own.
Did we miss anything? Tell us how you like to engage customers in the comments below! Or feel free to ask us for engagement advice. We’re here to help!
Read more: