Tips to Engage Your Audience

Email marketing fascinates me. It’s one of the cheapest and most effective ways to keep in touch with your current and potential customers. It gives the customer a way to receive discounts, news, and information about your brand. But as new generations emerge and are more tech-driven, could email marketing die?

A recent article “Learn How to Engage Gen Z with Email Marketing” discusses how to engage with Gen Z, offering seven useful tips.

I have to agree with author Syed Balkhi from the beginning when he states, “marketers are used to adapting and evolving as the world changes around them.” It’s true. We must always be ahead of changes and trends to be able to successfully position a brand and engage customers. My professor even jokes by saying we’re not normal and think differently. That is because marketers aren’t normal. (Which is a good thing!)

Gen Z are often stereotyped as being “always-on”, having short attention spans, and never checking their emails. But the truth is Gen Z still uses email. They describe it as essential to their lives and it is a part of their purchasing decisions.

So… how do we get those tech-savvy, “always-on” young adults with short attention spans, to pay attention to us?

Here are the seven tips:

1. Keep your emails short
2. Personalize your emails
3. Clearly identify your brand
4. Write compelling and engaging subject lines
5. Work with email marketing professionals
6. Explain how your brand fits with their identity
7. Send them what they want

To be quite honest, after reading those seven tips I had to look through the article again to find a strategy for targeting Gen Z specifically. I say this because those seven tips are email strategy 101.

Gen Z is not the only generation that hates long emails, bad subject lines and wants to receive special offers. WE ALL DO. Personally, if I open an email from a brand and it has a lot of text, it’s going straight in the trash. And I’m a millennial.

I understand Syed’s idea. Each generation comes with new challenges for marketers. As a millennial, we kicked traditional media to the curb and embraced social media and streaming platforms.

For a strategy to engage newer generations or any generation, I would use those exact seven tips to get them interested and receive positive KPIs, but to keep them interested, in competitive markets, marketers need to look beyond the obvious and outside the box.

Syed’s seven tips are in line with permission marketing, defined as “the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.”

You can thank GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) for that.

So maybe the best way to engage Gen Z is with respect? I’d say that’s a good approach if you want someone to like you.

Syed’s tips are straightforward and useful, but they don’t tackle a clever way to get a younger generation to stay interested and ensure they will keep opening your emails. The truth is, emails are a part of our daily lives and how companies keep in touch with us. They are our annoying pen pal. The least our annoying pen pal could do is keep things short and sweet, respect our time and give us an incentive to open their email.

Email strategies may be different for each generation but in my opinion once you have engaged a customer, the best way to keep them engaged, is with respect.