Are Your Consumers Quietly Quitting? 9 Tips To Increase Engagement

This week CNN got managers everywhere worked up again about “quiet quitting.” This concept, which came to fame behind the Great Resignation, is the idea of not quitting your job – just doing the bare minimum at work. Leadership teams are freaking out about it, rightly so, and hopefully examining their company cultures. But it’s not just a management issue. Marketers should take heed too. Why? Consumers have been quietly quitting lately as well.

Quietly quitting in the marketing world looks like a healthy newsletter mailing list but a very low open rate. It looks like a great number of social media followers, but no engagement. It looks like a blog with a high bounce rate.

During the pandemic, people got clear about how they spent their time and what was worth their attention. That doesn’t necessarily mean they unsubscribed, however. Today’s communications platforms lend themselves to passive consumption – or no consumption at all. So, you need to ask yourself, are your customers mailing it in?

If you suspect they are, here are 9 tips to increase engagement with your marketing efforts:

For newsletters:

1. Start with a subject line that sizzles. Keep it short. Make it personal. Use power words and numbers whenever possible. Power words include Greatest, Important, Improve, Surprising.
2. Publish more. This may sound counter intuitive but it works. At Ragan’s Future of Communications conference, the formula most experts embraced for 2022 was to double down on the amount of content they were pushing out. You’re broadcasting. Keep your consumer informed and entertained.
3. Keep it short. Enough said.

For social media:

1. Consider a podcast. Listening to a podcast is a choice. Scrolling through Instagram is a habit. Maybe it’s time to completely shake up your social strategy.
2. Go live. Live broadcasting – from any platform – connects people in ways they are craving after the pandemic years.
3. Have conversations. Social engagement takes place in the comments, not the stylized image. Worry less about looks and more about substance.

For blogs:

1. Make your headline useful. Similar to subject lines. Grab attention right away. Use active voice or ask a question. Use numbers in your headline; they elicit trust and confidence.
2. Consider readability. Readability is very important if you want people to read beyond d the headline. Use the FLESCH Readability Formula to help identify how to improve  readability.
3. Us headers. Headers help people read your work: use one header per every 200-300 words.