How to Improve Email Engagement: Top Tips and Tricks

You spend hours putting your email campaigns together, crafting the subject line, writing the copy, and adjusting the layout. Then you hit send, and the results are underwhelming. A few opens, even fewer clicks, maybe a couple of unsubscribes, and you’re left wondering whether all that effort was worth it.

It’s not just frustrating, it’s common. Research shows that while the average open rate is around 39.64%, click-through rates drop to 3.25%. That’s a huge gap between attention and action.

When engagement drops, conversions follow, and even your strongest offers can start to underperform.

The issue usually isn’t effort, it’s alignment. Your audience is scanning through dozens of emails a day, and unless what you send speaks directly to their needs, behavior, or timing, it gets buried.

To see real progress with your email marketing campaigns, you need to stop guessing what works and start tracking what does. That begins with understanding how email engagement is defined and which metrics actually reflect it.

What is email engagement?

Email engagement measures how your audience interacts with the messages you send. Not just whether they open them, but whether they click on links, scroll through your content, reply, forward the email, or unsubscribe after barely a glance.

Strong engagement shows that your message reached the right person, at the right time, with something worth their attention. When people are saving your emails, clicking through to your website, or even replying directly, you know the content is relevant and well-timed. 

On the other hand, when emails go unopened and unsubscribe rates go up, it usually points to a mismatch. Maybe the content feels generic, maybe the frequency is off, or maybe the message just doesn’t align with where the reader is in their customer journey.

Tracking engagement gives you more than just numbers. It shows whether your email marketing strategy is working and allows you to fix it early, test smarter approaches, and reconnect with your target audience. And you can do this quite easily with the best AI-powered email tools.

As tools get smarter, the impact of AI in marketing is becoming harder to ignore. AI is making it easier to spot patterns, personalize content, and improve timing.

Top email metrics to measure engagement

Here are 5 main email marketing metrics to monitor and gauge the performance of your email campaigns:

1. Open rate

This is the percentage of recipients who open your email. While it used to be the go-to metric for email marketers, it’s now more of a directional signal than a definitive measure. With Apple Mail privacy updates and similar features, some emails are recorded as ‘’open’’ even when the email wasn’t actually read. 

Still, if your open rate dips suddenly, it could mean your email subject lines need work, your timing is poor, or that your emails are landing in spam. 

2. Click-through rate (CTR)

CTR shows how many people clicked a link after opening your email. If your CTR is low, even with a decent open rate, your email content might be missing the mark. Maybe the offer isn’t compelling, or the calls to action aren’t clear. 

A strong Click-Through Rate usually points to well-aligned messaging and relevant content. And because it tracks actual behavior, it’s one of the clearest signs of engagement levels worth watching closely.

3. Click-to-open rate (CTOR)

While CTR looks at clicks as a percentage of your entire audience, CTOR narrows it down to those who actually opened your email. 

If 1,000 people received your message, 200 opened it, and 40 clicked a link, your Click-Through Rate is 4%, but your Click-to-Open Rate is 20%. That tells you one important thing: your content worked for the people who saw it.

CTR can be dragged down by issues like poor deliverability and bad subject lines. CTOR ignores all that and focuses on what happened after the open. 

If your CTOR is high, your email content is doing its job. If it’s low, even with a decent open rate, it’s time to rethink your message, layout, or calls to action. 

CTOR gives you a cleaner view of how engaging your content really is.

4. Unsubscribe rate

This tracks how many recipients opt out after reading your message. Every list will have some churn, but rising unsubscribe rates can signal poor targeting, excessive frequency, or messaging that doesn’t match the reader’s intent. 

If your email marketing campaigns are losing more people than they’re retaining, you may need to rethink your email strategy from how you segment your list to how often you send emails.

5. Conversion rate

This is the percentage of people who not only clicked but also completed your goal. It could be by making a purchase, signing up for a webinar, or claiming a discount code. 

It’s the clearest link between email marketing efforts and business outcomes. If your emails are getting opened and clicked, but you are getting zero conversions, something isn’t working. 

Look at the offer, landing page experience, or even the alignment between email messaging and audience expectations.

4 steps to improve email engagement

Here are simple yet effective ways to boost your email campaign engagement.

1. Focus on personalization

If you’re still sending the same email to your entire list, chances are, you won’t get great results from your campaign.

Personalization goes beyond using someone’s first name. It means using what you already know about your subscribers to shape your message. This includes tailored product suggestions, reminders based on browsing behavior, or content based on past purchases. 

Let’s say someone viewed a product and added it to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase. You can send them a cart abandonment email with that item front and center, plus a limited-time discount, to bring them back.

Studies show that personalized emails are significantly more effective. The importance of personalization in business keeps growing as customers expect brands to tailor content around them, not the other way around.

To deliver this kind of personalization consistently, you need a system that adapts as people interact with your content. An email marketing platform like GetResponse allows you to build workflows that trigger specific emails based on user actions, like a clicked link or a newsletter subscription. 

Here’s an example of such a workflow

That way, your follow-ups are more precise, and your emails stay relevant at every stage of the customer journey. 

2. Create content that’s relevant and exciting

The quickest way to lose engagement is to send content that feels random, generic, or disconnected from what your target audience cares about. 

Relevance is about timing, context, and usefulness. 

If someone browsed hiking boots on your site, your next email shouldn’t be a general newsletter about summer deals. A better follow-up would highlight your best-selling boots, include a sizing guide, or share a quick “how to break in new hiking boots” article. That kind of email matches the reader’s intent and is far more likely to get clicked.

Once you’ve got the topic right, how you present it matters just as much. 

Most people aren’t reading emails, they’re scanning. So your content needs to earn every second of their attention. 

Use a mix of short paragraphs, bold headings, and interactive elements like polls and sliders to keep the experience dynamic. 

Even small touches like a one-question survey or a carousel of top products can turn a scroll into a click.

Lastly, don’t limit yourself to product promos or updates. Share helpful guides, customer testimonials, quick wins, or even invite-only tips. People stay engaged when they feel like they’re getting more than just sales emails. With tools that support dynamic content, you can deliver the same email in different ways, depending on who’s receiving it and what they’ve done.

3. Make a good first impression

When someone sees your email, you have a few seconds to convince them it’s worth their time. That moment starts with the email subject line. If it’s vague, overly promotional, or packed with excessive punctuation, it gets ignored, or worse, marked as spam.

Subject lines that work create curiosity or offer a clear benefit. If you're a service-based business, you can use something like “Your free consultation is still open,” which feels direct and useful without sounding like a hard sell. 

Once they open the email, what they see should reflect the same level of thought. Visual appeal starts with a simple, clean layout, responsive design, and visual consistency. 

About 61% of people check their emails on mobile. If your message doesn’t load properly or requires too much scrolling, they won’t stick around. 

Use short paragraphs, bold headings, and one clear action button. Whether it’s “Claim Your Offer” or “Download the Guide,” make the next step obvious.

Don’t underestimate how much your design signals trust. People associate sloppy or outdated layouts with low quality. A polished email with just enough interactive elements, like clickable product blocks, hover effects, embedded videos, and even an engaging email signature, can make a big difference in how your email recipient responds. 

And you don’t have to build everything from scratch. Most email marketing tools offer responsive email templates with drag-and-drop features, so your emails look sharp across all screen sizes with minimal design work.

4. Time your emails right

Timing is about choosing the right day of the week and showing up at the moment your reader is most likely to engage. Instead of syncing messages to subscriber behavior, many businesses still rely on batch sends that go out to everyone at 9 a.m. on a random Tuesday. 

A better strategy is to build a workflow that triggers emails immediately, 24, 48, or 72 hours after someone subscribes, at the exact same time they first opted in. 

If someone joined your email list at 7:30 p.m. while browsing your resource library, there’s a good chance they’re active during that window. Sending your next few emails at the same time makes them more likely to catch your message, especially in that crucial early stage of the customer journey. 

This also gives you room to build momentum gradually. Your welcome email could deliver a valuable freebie. The second, 24 hours later, could share a short video on how to get the most from it. Forty-eight hours in, send them a success story or case study.

With tools that offer email automation, you can set these sequences once and let behavior guide the delivery. That means if the user's behavior shifts, the tools will adjust the delivery time and ensure your emails are sent at the right time when the recipient is most likely to engage with them.

Conclusion

The best way to improve your email engagement isn’t to send more emails. It’s making them more resonant, personalized, and engaging, and delivering them at the right time. 

Tracking the right email metrics helps you figure out what’s working, what’s not, and where to tweak. That might mean rewriting your subject line, sending more relevant content, or adjusting your send time based on actual user behavior.

You don’t need to overcomplicate the process to do it well. With the right email marketing platform, you can use customizable templates, build smart workflows, and automate follow-ups without starting from scratch every time.