A couple of days ago I mentioned some nonsense I'd read in an article which purported to show you how to get more engagement from your emails but actually did nothing of the sort.

But it did beg the question, “so what actually does get more email engagement?”.

Well, let's start off by admitting that “engagement” is a hugely abused word.

Rather like “authenticity”, it's come to mean some sort of generic, ill-defined good thing.

So the first thing to bear in mind is that engagement isn't your goal.

If you're doing email marketing, your real goal is to get more sales (or perhaps get more people to contribute to your charity or whatever your business objective is).

Engagement is just a means to an end.

It doesn't matter how engaged your email audience is, if they're not buying you're wasting your time.

So with that in mind, I've found that three things lead to the kind of engagement that gets you more sales.

Firstly, if people aren't opening and reading your emails, they're not going to buy anything. So that's your first goal: get them to actually open and read your emails.

And the simplest way to get people to open and read your emails is to write about topics your audience cares about, and to write in an interesting way. Tell stories. Use unusual examples. Write about things your folks can relate to.

Secondly, the more your audience is used to taking action when they open one of your emails, the more likely they are to take action when you ask them to buy.

So make sure that almost all of your emails have a call to action.

Sometimes that can be small: hitting reply to say they've received something, liking something on social media for you, hitting reply to ask you a question or complete a survey.   

If someone has taken a small action today, they're much more likely to take a big action later. They kind of get in the habit.

So make sure your emails have actions your readers can take, big or small.

Finally, what gets people to take that final big action of buying is simply that they're ready. All their questions have been answered and they feel comfortable buying from you.

So make sure that over time you've answered all the key questions someone would need to know and feel to be ready to buy from you. And make sure that you've shown them the value of solving their problems.

Some of that can be done through case studies. Others through an FAQ email or emails which answer questions people have asked you which you know your readers are probably asking themselves too.

And sometimes you can just ask them to send questions in to you and answer them in your next email.

Now those three points might not sound like engagement in the sense you often hear it talked about. There's not necessarily any liking or sharing going on.

But it's the type of engagement that leads to sales. And that's what counts.