Why No One Is Reading Your Emails and How to Fix It

The numbers say that email is a powerful and profitable communication tool, but your experience may not agree. Are you finding yourself struggling with low open rates for your emails? Are consumers ignoring the emails they do open?

You are not alone. With email open rates below 15 percent and click-through rates below 8 percent for many businesses, capturing the potential of email may feel a bit out of reach. The good news is that email is alive and well as a marketing tool. You just need the right strategies to make it work for your business.

Why Email Is Still A Powerful Platform

Despite the sometimes low open and click-through rates that accompany emails, the statistics show that people like emails. In fact, 70 percent of individuals between 18 and 34 prefer email communications from businesses. That number only goes up among older demographics.

Consider these other powerful email marketing facts:

• Email marketing has an average ROI of $42 for every $1 spent.
• 78 percent of marketers has enjoyed an increase in email engagement over the last year.
• 8 out of 10 consumers will open a welcome email.
• 99 percent of individuals who have an email account check it at least once a day.

If you want to connect with your target audiences, communicate important information about your brand, and earn conversions in a cost-effective way, you need to make email marketing part of your strategy.

Why No One Is Reading Your Emails

There is no doubt that emails are popular. That means that the reason people are not reading your emails is not because they don’t like email, but because your emails are not getting their attention. Here are a few reasons consumers may skip over your subject line in their inbox (assuming they in fact landed in their inbox).

Your emails are not connecting with your audiences.

If people are deleting your missives, it may be because they simply find them irrelevant. This typically indicates that your business either does not understand your target audiences or is failing to segment your emails to specific groups of consumers.

This mistake is one of the most fundamental errors in marketing, and can have a significantly negative impact on your email performance. No matter how deep your discount, no matter how big your news, or how educational your thoughts are, your emails will not succeed if they are not targeted to the needs, interests and pain points of the recipients.

Your emails are ill-timed.

Content is king, but timing is everything when it comes to marketing emails. One of the most common email marketing mistakes is sending emails too frequently, or sending certain emails at the wrong stage of the sales funnel.

For example, consumers may not want to bear from you every day. Emails encouraging a purchase may not work for a consumer who is hearing from you for the first time. Poorly timed messages like these will head for the trash, with your brand reputation not far behind.

Your emails are poorly written.

In order to win over consumers, your emails need to present a polished, professional, and branded tone. While casual missives are acceptable if it meshes with your brand, you still need to come across as competent and trustworthy. Emails that are grammatically incorrect, overly casual, or that diverge from your brand are less likely to win over consumers’ trust and engagement.

How to Increase Email Engagement

The good news is that you CAN leverage the power of email for your business. Here are a few tips for creating emails that engage.

Segment your email lists.

The first step in improving email engagement is to break down your email list into smaller and more specific groups. You may want to break down your contacts by their position in the sales funnel, their pain points, their decision-making capacity, their geographic location, their purchase history, their website activity, their job title, their previous interactions with your emails, and more. Once you segment your lists, you can focus on creating email content targeted to their needs.

Target your content.

Once you segment your contact lists, you can create high-quality content that meets the needs of each segment. For example, you may want to offer a discount to consumers who have visited your website in the past, while nurturing leads along the sales funnel with educational material. With content carefully crafted with your audience’s needs in mind, and delivered in a professional and well-written way, you will create emails your audiences want to read.

Leverage email automation.

Creating and sending targeted emails can be a lot of work. Save yourself time and improve your email performance with automations through GoCRM.

Automations refer to pre-written email templates that GoCRM automatically sends when a contact takes a certain action (called a trigger). These templates can be single emails or a series of emails intended to nurture a lead toward a specific goal.

For example, a trigger may be a lead who has not contacted your business in the last 60 days. On day 60, GoCRM will send out your pre-written email intended for cold leads. Similarly, GoCRM may send a welcome email when a sale is closed, or begin a lead nurturing email series when someone submits a form on your website.

Leverage data to your advantage.

The more you know, the more effective your email campaigns become. Capture and utilize information about your audiences and your email performance to identify best practices for your emails.

For example, use data to understand your target audiences, identify their pain points, and craft messaging that is meaningful to them. Similarly, use analytics to determine how effective each email is, identify the messaging that is working, and tweak your campaigns to maximize engagement.

With the right data, automation, messaging, and timing, you can boost the effectiveness of your emails. Get people reading, and responding, to your messages with intelligent email marketing put together by professional marketers. CODESM can show you how to get started with email marketing!