Orchestrating your email and text programs can significantly increase subscriber engagement and ROI while respecting your budget. Below are insights and strategies you can use to orchestrate your email and text marketing efforts.
Understand subscriber engagement and channel preferences
Subscriber engagement across different communication channels can significantly impact a subscriber’s lifetime value and purchase rate. Our data suggests that subscribers who engage with both email and text are twice as valuable as those who engage on a single channel alone. This means that aiming for a high level of engagement across both channels should be a priority in your communication strategy.
Keep in mind that not all subscribers engage with channels the same way. Some might have a stronger affinity towards text, while others might prefer email. In fact, our data suggests that eligible text subscribers, whether they're text-only or multi-channel, tend to have higher engagement rates compared to email subscribers. It’s critical to understand your subscribers' channel preferences and tailor your communication strategy accordingly.
If a subscriber isn't engaged on one channel, don’t assume they can be readily reached on the other. Our data shows that when text subscribers are disengaged, there's a 94% chance they also can't be reached via email at a given time, and vice versa. It's therefore essential to understand the relationship between your disengaged subscribers and their engagement potential on other channels.
Implement strategies to optimize email and text orchestration
The strategies described below can help you effectively orchestrate email and text messages to improve subscriber engagement and ROI.
Promote list growth across channels
Subscribers who are engaged on both email and text are 2-3x more likely to purchase than those engaged only on a single channel.
Consider these strategies to increase the number of engaged subscribers on both channels:
- Link to a landing page from an email or text message to collect contact information for the other channel. In an email, for example, link to a landing page that collects the subscriber’s phone number.
- Create a joined-a-segment journey to invite subscribers who demonstrate engagement on one channel to receive messages on the other. Link to a landing page in a journey message to collect email addresses or phone numbers.
Increase engagement opportunities
Engaged subscribers (those who’ve clicked a link in a message) are 8x more likely to purchase than unengaged subscribers.
Consider these strategies to increase engagement:
- Enhance your welcome journeys with additional touchpoints, escalating offers, and more engaging content.
- A/B test your content to increase engagement.
- Activate all available abandonment journeys.
- Activate all available product-related journeys (e.g., price drop and low inventory journeys).
- Build and activate an extended winback journey.
- Include personalized product recommendations in your emails.
- Use joined-a-segment journeys to target high-ROI subscribers.
Segment campaigns by audience engagement
Approximately 66% of text subscribers and 87% of email subscribers are unengaged and purchase at much lower rates than engaged subscribers. It’s important to communicate differently with unengaged subscribers in order to increase their likelihood of engaging and making a purchase.
Consider these strategies for interacting differently with unengaged subscribers:
- Create a dynamic segment of subscribers who haven’t clicked on a link in your messages and exclude them from all but your best or most compelling promotional campaigns. For example, excluding unengaged subscribers from email campaigns boosts both deliverability and revenue.
- For campaigns that include unengaged subscribers, send a different message to your unengaged segment with a more valuable offer.
Target preferred channels
Our data shows that one third of multi-channel subscribers have a preferred channel and make purchases at a similar rate to engaged subscribers on a single channel.
Consider these strategies to make sure you’re sending messages to subscribers on their preferred channel:
- Send multi-channel subscribers a message on their preferred channel first. If you use two different providers for email and text messaging, send a text message first—our data shows that 4.5x more multi-channel subscribers prefer text to email.
- If subscribers are engaged on both channels, retarget previous campaign message recipients on both channels with relevant follow-up messages.
- If subscribers are engaged on only one channel, retarget previous campaign message recipients on the engaged channel with relevant follow-up messages.
| Engaged on text | Engaged on both email and text | Engaged on email |