Email marketing ranks as the third most effective marketing channel to reach your audience. Studies suggest that it has great reach, offers a high ROI, and is the preferred communication channel for most clients. Despite this preference, it isn’t always easy to convince readers to open your email.
If you catch them at the wrong time, say the wrong thing, or make a simple mistake, you can lose their attention. To help make sure your campaign is as successful as possible, here are five reasons people may not open your emails, and how you can fix it:
1. Your subject line is generic
Your audience is bombarded with many marketing emails every single day, so if yours are lost in the shuffle they’ll never get opened. Personalization and incentive offers are a great way to grab somebody’s attention immediately and give them a chance to consider opening your email. In fact, studies show that simply personalizing an email subject line had higher clickthrough rates than emails that did not. All you need to do is start adding first names before the rest of your subject line.
2. Your preview text isn’t working
Email is no longer a traditional desktop-based communication tool. According to Litmus’ “State of Email” report, 54% of emails were opened on a mobile device in 2016. As mobile usage continues to increase, this number stands to increase as well. What this means is that your preview text is more important than ever. When a user opens their email application on a mobile device, they’re going to see three things — the sender, the subject line, and the preview text. You’ll have about 100 characters to convince the reader to open your email, so you need to make every word count.
3. You’re not using other forms of engaging content
Using videos in your email is a great way to increase clickthrough rates, how much of your email people read, and even conversions. Simply including the word video in your subject line is often enough to encourage people to open the email and look. If your emails struggle to attract opens or conversions, creating some videos and advertising them is an easy way to give your campaign a quick shot of adrenaline. You can also integrate other interactive coolness.
4. Your email went out on the wrong day
When you have your audience’s undivided attention they’re more likely to open and read your email. You need to be smart about when you send your messages. These studies show that by far the most successful email messages are sent on Tuesday. Accordingly, email open rates tend to be lower on Wednesday. During the weekday, Thursday tends to be the day with the lowest amount of marketing emails sent, and it also tends to be the day with the highest open and engagement rates. Thursday should be your plan B. Oh yeah, you want to avoid weekends — open rates drop drastically over the weekend because your audience is busy and less willing to open business-related emails.
5. You’re emailing the wrong audience
Segmentation — one of the most obvious reasons that people don’t open your emails is because it simply doesn’t apply to them. If you find that open rates are particularly low, it’s entirely possible that you either have the wrong message or the wrong audience. The solution to this is carefully segmenting your audience and developing a message specifically for them. Create campaigns based on their position in your marketing funnel. If they’ve already bought from you, offer them tips and how-tos on how to get the most from your products or services. If they haven’t, give them more targeted information.
Having trouble converting in your email marketing campaign? Let us help.