These three strategies for balancing content and promotions in your email campaigns will endear you to your customers and kick your open rates up a notch.

As content marketing gains more traction as a strategy and practice in business, companies like the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) are getting savvier about finding out what’s working in the marketplace. The CMI polls hundreds of businesses each year to ask questions about the effectiveness of content marketing campaigns and to gather data on the state of digital marketing tactics in the B2B and B2C spaces. The Content Marketing Institute’s 2105 B2C Content Marketing Trends – North America report delivers some fantastic insights for B2C marketers. Here are some highlights:

• B2C marketers are embracing content marketing, with social media content (other than blogs) accounting for 93 percent of content created and    eNewsletters clocking in second at 80 percent.

• Marketers rate eNewsletters as the most effective B2C tactic in their mix.

• Two of the biggest challenges marketers face with content is measuring effectiveness (51 percent) and producing engaging content (50 percent).

Reading between the lines, it’s clear that delivering content is working for marketers, but the space is getting crowded, and engagement is becoming more of a challenge.

Three ways to balance content and promotions is to boost engagement

The folks at the Content Marketing Institute do a wonderful job of distilling the data into ideas for action we can all take. Here are three rules of thumb from the institute and its partners that will deliver some balance to your campaigns and help you become more than just another offer in the inbox:

1. Follow the 4-1-1 rule.

Content marketing founder Joe Pulizzi is credited with establishing a guideline that applies to Tweets: “For every one self-serving tweet, you should re-tweet one relevant tweet and most importantly share four pieces of relevant content written by others.” Apply this idea to all of your communication – provide useful content a majority of the time, and minimize your “ask”. This might mean balancing content within emails and/or updating your approach to what kind of content you put out on a regular basis. Bottom line: Nobody wants to be “sold” all the time.

2. Be useful.

Jay Baer, author of YouTility, is a consultant who focuses on engagement almost exclusively. His philosophy is “sell something and you make a customer. Help someone, and you make a customer for life.” A good example for this time of year: If you market laundry detergent, you could send out 50 coupons over the next few weeks and people may download them or not. Send an email that teaches folks how to get cranberry stains out of a linen tablecloth (with a link to the coupon at the end) and you have made a new friend.

3. Think like a journalist.

The other big statistic in the Content Marketing Institute’s survey: More than 89 percent of marketers are trying to figure out how to create more engaging and higher quality content. This is something journalists have done for years. So stop thinking like a salesperson and start thinking like a journalist, then see what happens to your engagement rate. Look to magazines in your space to see what they do well and steal those ideas, or better yet, hire some journalists who’ve been around for a while to show you the ropes.

If you’re really serious about creating the right balance in your email marketing campaigns, consider downloading Forrester’s report, Balance User Needs with Business Goals – it’s pricey, but it will help larger enterprises align user needs with business goals, and provides a multi-step process to follow in order to create a scalable email approach that will sell product, build loyalty and acquire new customers.Content marketing as a strategy will continue to evolve. As marketers, agencies, and technology developers get better at measuring results, we’ll all be able to optimize and refine our approach. But don’t wait for the industry to catch up with your business – you know your customers better than anyone, so take the time to review results and refine your approach based on the data you see.