Our email newsletter is one of our most important marketing components of our business.
In fact, it drove a large portion of our sales on our Canva Social Media Templates last week (by the way, we totally hit our sales goal, woohoo!).
A large part of why our email newsletters work is that we aim to offer extremely valuable advice to business owners and we ask people to engage with us in our newsletters.
In today’s post, we share how we get people to engage with our email newsletters and how you can increase your email newsletter engagement too.
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1 | Give before you take
Before we ask for any type of feedback or try and sell to our email list, we always try and give back to our audience first.
We share the behind-the-scenes of our business, sneak peeks of what’s coming up in the future, advice on growing a business from our experience, and so much more.
Having an email list isn’t just about selling or trying to get their feedback, you also have to give.
What’s important to remember is that everyone’s attention is being pulled in a hundred different ways. You have to grab the attention of your email subscribers and a great way to do that is by being authentic and giving away information for free without expecting anything in return.
We like to use the analogy of depositing money into the bank. By giving away information for free, you’re “depositing” money into the bank of your audience. Then, once you’re ready to sell, there is “money” you are able to take from because you’ve been depositing money over time.
Related Post: 5 New Ways to Attract More Customers or Clients
2 | Include call to actions
Often people make the mistake of assuming the subscribers on their email list should know what to do.
“Of course they know I welcome their feedback, why would they think otherwise!”
Wrong-o. People are distracted and need to be reminded constantly to engage with you.
Often people don’t get engagement in their email newsletters because they don’t ask for it.
Call to action can include: asking questions in your emails and reminding them to reply with their answers, urging them to share on social media, and telling them what they should click on and why.
Each email you send should have a call-to-action, whether it be to click over and read your blog post, reply to your email, or purchase your product or service.
Related post: 4 Ways To Promote Your Business That Will Give You A Big Return on Investment
3 | Share your vulnerabilities
We’re slowly getting better at this but there’s always room for improvement.
Since the beginning of this year, we’ve been sharing our vulnerabilities more openly with our email list. We’ve implemented a portion of our email newsletters sharing the high and low of our weeks, sharing an awesome win for the week and also something we were disappointed or frustrated with.
We’ve been thrilled with the response and have seen a significant uptick in replies to our email newsletters after implementing the high/low.
We’ve found that being honest with our audience and sharing how we definitely don’t have it all together has really helped us connect on a deeper level with our audience.
Related post: How to Set Priorities For Your Business
4 | Feature your customers
Another new feature we’ve implemented in our email newsletters is randomly featuring our customers and boy has it paid off.
Featuring our customers has helped us in numerous ways. We like to use the element of surprise, so we don’t often tell the customer that we’re featuring them in our newsletter ahead of time.
To get the reply back from them of how happy and honored they are to have been featured makes our day. It’s important to remember that we’re connecting with our humans and that paying it forward by featuring your customers is a great way to engage with your audience on a deeper level.
Related post: 5 Tips for Giving Thanks to Clients and Customers
Final Thoughts: Email Newsletter Engagement
We are certainly not email newsletter geniuses but the tactics listed above have really helped us deepen our relationship with our email list and have encouraged more engagement than we’ve seen in years past.
At the end of the day, we’re here to help women business owners grow their brands online through professional web design, and the more we engage with our email subscribers, the more people we get to help all across the globe.
Nothing beats getting a reply back from a subscriber on how you’ve helped them and we look forward to connecting with even more amazing girl bosses!