So you’ve put together a mailing list of the people that are interested in your brand. Perhaps you have an email marketing campaign running, hoping to turn leads into successful conversions. Yet however much you try, the engagement rates for your emails remain woefully low. The global average open and click-through rates stand at about 16 and 10% respectively, but your numbers are much lower, and your campaigns are not doing as well as you would have hoped. What could you be doing wrong? Here are some reasons why your email marketing strategy may not be working effectively to increase sales for your business.
- Your email subject lines are not compelling enough.
Dull and uninteresting subject lines are among the biggest reasons why subscribers opt to avoid opening emails altogether. If the intent of the email you send is unclear, a recipient is more likely to ignore it or even mark it as spam.
Think more about the content of your subject lines and write them out to be as persuasive as possible to your subscribers. A few tips to make this happen include highlighting what is inside each email, using humor in your text, sparking curiosity, and using personalization words or phrases, all while keeping your message short and sweet.
- Your strategy lacks consistency.
Statistics indicate that welcome emails have higher open rates, which reflect a first-time subscriber’s initial high interest in a brand. Many business owners look to capitalize on this by sending as much content as possible in the short period where they still retain this initial attention. After this, many businesses either vanish without any more communication or send emails at odd timings in a desperate bid to still retain subscribers’ attention. Erratic, random messaging is often seen as a lack of consistency that almost always results in a user ignoring emails over time, drastically reducing your overall engagement rates. Prevent this from happening to your business by having a consistent schedule of planned email campaigns. Instead of sending many emails at first sign up, try sending the welcome email first and the rest of the emails over the next few weeks on a regularly planned timetable. Consistency establishes your brand as dependable, and your subscribers will almost always interact with your emails as a result.
- Your emails don’t offer clear value to your subscribers.
When your emails regularly offer nothing of value to subscribers, they will most likely start to ignore them as time goes by. However, if the people on your mailing list have come to expect to benefit from your messages more often than not, they will be eager to see what your emails have in store for them. Include value in the form of offers, discounts, free products, services, or informative content, and emails from you will always be enticing to your subscribers.
- Your message is not personalized enough.
An email that seems automatically generated is easy to ignore when people want to connect with other people. Personalization shines here as one of the most effective ways to persuade users to interact with your emails more. However, sometimes effective personalization goes beyond basic practices like using a person’s first name or using a second-person perspective when addressing your subscribers. Make your emails more targeted by including mentions of a user’s past activities on your website. If you know their location, then schedule your email to arrive at the right time when they are most likely to view it. Avoid generic sender addresses that make your message sound like it came from a company bot, and embrace personalized sender email addresses that allow you, an actual person to connect better with your subscribers. It is more personalized this way and is likely to encourage email recipients to connect with you, the sender, in return by engaging with your emails more frequently.
- You don’t make it convenient for subscribers to view your content.
The failure to account for the optimization of your email across various devices and platforms could be contributing to your low engagement rates. Outside of computers, nearly half of all email opens happened mobile devices in 2018, and the number steadily continues to rise to date. An email message that isn’t optimized for mobile viewing could put off the subscriber who receives it, discouraging them from opening your emails again. Some users have settings that prevent the loading of images, so you must make the plain text version of your email easy to read, even without the flashy imagery. Keep your content convenient for the contacts on your email list to interact with, and they will almost always maintain the interactive connection.
- Your emails are too long.
An email user will only ever spend a short time perusing the contents of an email before they log off and attend to other matters. A long winded email will most likely bore them into avoiding your emails altogether. We live in the digital age where information spreads fast and is more easily consumed in small amounts. In the same vein, you should strive to be concise while keeping your emails short but packed with value. Users will appreciate your attempt to respect their time and will most likely continue engaging with the content in your emails in the future.
When the engagement rates for your business’ marketing emails remain low, check to see if any of these reasons could be contributing to the problem. Carefully scrutinize the content of your messages and change the way that you share your emails. With the correct tweaks, the interaction with your emails should increase, translating to potentially more sales in the long run.
