Forrester have released a report predicting that individuals are are going to receive 9000 email marketing messages a year. That's is nearly 25 marketing emails a day.

Already today, email marketers are being advised to engage with their recipients rather than just trying to target them. If your recipients are going to be receiving that many emails everyday, engagement is going to be critical. Let's face it, most of those emails are not going to be opened.

Dela Quist wrote on the DMA's email marketing blog last week about recipients being "unemotionally subscribed". These are those users that make up the majority of your list - the ones that are not always opening and reading your emails. They stay subscribed preferring instead to ignore your emails because there might be a use for them another time. Unsubscribing now would mean the hassle of trying to find the website again when I actually want to read the email. I am defintely guilty of this - though likewise a subject line might temporarily sway me from locating the delete button immediately.

So how can you stand out from the pack and engage with your audience?

Before you can engage with your list, you first need to listen and understand your audience. Here are 3 ways to start engaging more with your list.

Use behavioural information from website tracking or through share-to-social type tools to add one level of understanding; as well as surveys, replies or other tools to obtain more specific responses.

Use techniques like Silverpop's send time optimisation feature to deliver your message at a time when the recipient is more likely to be in front of their computer.

Once you have a deeper understanding of your list, you are then able to split your list up into 4 categories and look at reports based on these groups.

1. "unemotionally subscribed" - see above

2. "engaged" - those who have opened, clicked etc

3. "engaged to buy" - showed a desire to purchase or have purchased

4. "engaged to influence" - those who are virally spreading your brand to others

More to come on this, as being engaged with your list is going to become more critical over time!

Further resources:

Webinar: Maximise Results with Engagement Marketing Technologies
Whitepaper: Engagement Marketing: Partnering With Your Customers for Success
Case Study: National Express

[image credit: quinn.anya]