Daniel Vaczi
Email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing channels to reach your audience. Studies still suggest that it has great reach, offers a high ROI, and is the preferred communication channel for a majority of 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 one simple mistake you can lose their attention. To help make sure your campaign is as successful as possible, here are seven reasons people may not open your emails, and how you can fix it:
1. You Have A Generic Subject Line
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 is 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 increases open rates by almost 18%. To enjoy that boost yourself, all you need to do is start adding first names before the rest of your subject line.
2. Your Preview Text Sucks
Email is no longer a traditional laptop or desktop-based communication tool. In Q4 2014, 66% of all emails were either opened and read or deleted on a mobile device. As smartphone 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 theirs email application on a mobile device, they’re going to see several things - the name of 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 Don't Use Other Forms Of Engaging Content Such As Videos
Using videos in your email is a great way to increase click-thru rates, how much of your email people read, and even conversions. In fact, simply including the word video in your subject line is often enough to encourage people to open the email and take a 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.
4. You Don't Stand Out From the Crowd
When you have your audience’s undivided attention they’re much more likely to open and read your email. If you’re either sending messages at the same time as everybody else, or sending messages when your audience isn’t available, your open rate suffers.
You need to be smart about when you send your messages. Studies show that by far the most marketing email messages are sent on Wednesday. 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.
Also, you want to avoid weekends completely without a very compelling reason. 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
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-to videos on how to get the most from your goods or services. If they haven’t, give them more targeted information.
6. Your Email Contains SPAM Triggers
Today, all email servers are built to automatically identify and cast unwanted emails as SPAM. An estimated 21% of email marketing messages get sent straight to SPAM. If your messages end up in the SPAM folder, it’s unlikely that anybody is going to read them.
Here are some common SPAM triggers you need to make sure to avoid:
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Certain words such as cash, free, save, and quote.
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Attaching files without a lot of content in the body.
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Unnecessary tags and sloppy coding.
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Sending to unsolicited email addresses (higher unsubscription and bounce rates may cause your future messages to trigger).
7. You Gave Up
Sometimes you do everything correctly and still can’t get somebody to open your email. Maybe they were on a trip or were going for a jog when they received your message. By the time they checked their email, there were so many other messages that you got deleted along with the rest.
To avoid situations like this, you should sometimes consider sending a repeat email to anybody who didn’t open it in the first place. One expert gave this a shot by tweaking the subject line one week later and sending the email again to anybody who didn’t open it the first time. His success was immediate, as open rates increase by almost 55%. By carefully tweaking your email campaign, you’ll be able to boost your open rate in no time.
