deletingThere are plenty of articles on the web about the benefits of email marketing. As many people are aware, it can be an extremely effective marketing method. It’s very affordable, yet is capable of reaching huge numbers of your potential customers, and talking to them personally. So, with so many people extolling the virtues of email marketing, it can be incredibly frustrating if you’re not experiencing the same kind of results from your campaigns.

Do you think you’re doing everything right, but your emails are still getting deleted (or not reaching your customer’s inbox in the first place)? There could be a simple reason for that. In this age of email saturation, it doesn’t take much to motivate a customer to reach for the delete button. Here are a few of the reasons why your customers might be rejecting your emails, and what you can do to change that:

Your Subject Lines Aren’t Good Enough

Although it’s been said many times before, this bears repeating: the subject line is one of the most important parts of a marketing email. The importance of the subject line has increased in recent years with more and more people using smartphones (and now smartwatches) for email. It might be the only part of your email that your customers see.

Think of the subject line as a preview of the email’s body. If something in the subject line appeals to the reader, they will be much more likely to open and read it. Conversely, if something doesn’t appeal to them, the email will be deleted immediately.

There are certain subject line faux pas that are an immediate turn off for customers. For example, using ALL CAPS in your subject line, excessive exclamation marks or including things like ‘Warning’ or ‘Re:’ are likely to get your messages flagged as spam. Also, beware of promising things that seem too good to be true. The writers of the following subject line may have thought they were being enticing, but most users will just assume that it’s a nuisance:

So how can you make your subject lines more enticing to your customers? The key is to keep them short (around 40 characters), and give your customers a clue to what the email’s body contains. Many customers also respond well to subject lines that are personalised, like this one:

Just make sure that you get this right. There aren’t many customers that are likely to respond to an email with this subject line:

Your Email Doesn’t Have a Point

Do you ever ask yourself what the point of the emails your sending is? As impressive as you think the products and services you offer are, if all your emails are doing is showcasing them, your customers will soon get bored. Modern consumers have become very jaded to excessive self-promotion. Your marketing emails should tell them something interesting, or offer them a solution to a problem that they have. This doesn’t mean that all your emails have to be based around complicated or thought-provoking subjects. At the moment, for example, many customers would probably find Father’s Day gift suggestions incredibly useful, like in this message from L’Occitane:

Obviously, this just scratches the surface of why customers might be deleting your emails. There are many more things that make an interesting an engaging email. But, if you just bare these things in mind when crafting your messages, you should achieve more success with your email marketing.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net