It’s a crushing feeling – particularly when you’ve spent what feels like hours on an email marketing campaign.
A few days after sending it out, you check the stats, and realise that virtually no one opened it.
What went wrong? The offer you had sent out was enticing, you spent ages on the design and the copy was proofread by virtually everyone in the office.
What gives?
Actually, it could be a number of things, and you’re not alone in possibly slipping on one of the following email marketing banana skins:
1. The subject line was so dull
The most important part of your email is the subject line.
Unfortunately, yours may have simply been too dull to demand an open.
Remember – this is the first thing most people will see before heading into your email, therefore it needs to inspire, talk directly to the recipient and offer some kind of cliffhanger.
Check out these ten small subject line tweaks that will almost definitely improve your open rates.
2. You’ve got your audience all wrong
We’ve all unsubscribed from email campaigns when we have absolutely zero interest in whatever it is that’s being promoted.
In those instances, it means we’ve been targeted by a company that hasn’t done it’s audience homework, and if you’re experiencing consistently bad open rates, you may have made the same mistake.
Take some time to research and learn as much as you can about your audience. This should come from your business plan initially, but remember that your audience’s habits and preferences will change over time.
If your newsletter sign-up forms are asking the wrong questions and attracting the wrong people – change them!
3. You picked the worst possible time to send
This is a relatively easy one to rectify, providing you have some email marketing campaigns to look back on that performed particularly well.
Sending your email at the wrong time will greatly reduce open rates, as your message slips down the recipient’s inbox, never to be seen again.
Take a look at the campaigns that have performed well in the past, and pay attention to the send times. It’s likely you’ll see a pattern, but you can apply common sense, too. For instance, if you’re a shoe retailer, chances are you’ll gain the most engagement if you send your promotional emails in the evening while people are chilling out on the sofa playing with their smartphones.
4. Your email looks dreadful on smartphones
Again, a really simple one to rectify!
Check that last email that performed so badly on your smartphone. How does it look? If it’s almost impossible to read, or you have to zoom in and out of the content, you haven’t optimised it for mobile.
Your email marketing client should do this for you automatically. If it doesn’t, look for a new one!
5. You’ve been a bit… cold
We talk a lot about personalisation in email marketing, and its importance cannot be underestimated.
Emails that arrive without any form of personalisation read as though they’ve been written for everyone but the recipient.
You need to make your subscribers feel special, and you can do that by addressing them by name or providing an offer that’s based on their previous buying habits.
Don’t be cold; prove you know your subscribers like the back of your hand.
Wrapping up
See? No need to panic. Low open rates are fixed easily. We hope our tips above point you in the right direction.
