This is Why Your Customers Ignore Your EmailsBy Stefanie Daneau

According to Forbes, 67 percent of marketers believe email marketing is a great path to increase return-on-investment. 

So why are so many companies struggling to gain consistent conversion and engagement rates with email?

It could be a simple as sending to the correct audience or as complex as tracking and optimizing your emails properly.

Let’s talk about how you can start to generate success with your email marketing. With a little bit of strategy and a little bit of spice, you’ll have your email marketing working for you in no time!

Correct Audience List

Send your emails at the right time. The time of day and day of week are both critical to reaching your audience. This ensures: 

  1. They will actually open the email; and 
  2. It’s convenient for them to spend the time to go through it.

Many email platforms believe that middle of the week and late afternoon is the best time, when people aren’t busy with work or weekend related activities, but we always recommend testing what your audience responds to and make your own schedule.

Some email marketing software, such as Mailchimp, can recommend when it’s best for your emails to send, based on historical data of your lists. This takes a little time, but it’s worth the effort.

Segment Your Message 

What is it that you would like your subscribers to do? Do you have customers in the same list as prospects? Do you have people you’d like to sell to and others you’d like to keep engaged?

Segment your lists and email messages based on the actions you’d like them to take. This can help you get more engagement in your email messages, without boggling down others whom you’ll loose interest and possibly unsubscribe.

Create Compelling Content

This seems easy enough, but many organizations doing email marketing create content topics off the top of their heads, without really understanding what their subscribers want.

Remember, it’s not about your interest, but about your audiences’ interest.

A great way to find compelling content to share with your subscribers is to look at your Google Analytics for clues in keywords and searches they do on your website. Use that as a tool to generate more of those kinds of content to share with them.

Subject line

Your email subject line can make or break your email marketing success, so choose it carefully.

There are a couple of rules here:

  1. Don’t try to oversell what you have or mislead people to click open your email if you’re not providing that same content; and
  2. Don’t overuse punctuation to try to get attention.

The subject line should be compelling enough for someone to click on it, but straightforward enough they don’t feel misled.

Most Important Info Up Top

As with any other marketing, you only have a short time to capture someone’s attention before they loose interest or get distracted.

Make your point, make it quick, and keep it visible.

Keep it Interesting

Don’t let your content in your emails get stale.

Mix it up.

Keep it interesting.

Stop Selling Fatigue

We all know email is a great tool for selling, but for the love of Pete do not send every single email about a sale.

It’s called selling fatigue and is enough to make anyone sick.

We all know you want to sell your product, it’s the best thing ever, we get it, but just try to throw something interesting in there once in awhile.

This will go a long way in keeping people engaged.

Call-to-Action

If you’re sending emails on a regular schedule and you provide some really cool content your subscribers want, but you find no one takes action, chances are you’re just not telling them what to do next.

This is known as a call-to-action.

You have to tell people what you want them to do. Don’t make them think about it.

Micro-Conversions

Micro-conversions are similar to baby steps in the conversion process.

Say, for example, you sell a product or service that costs a lot of money and maybe it takes people several interactions or a longer time to make a decision to purchase. You can’t expect them to jump right into a purchase after one message.

You have to nurture them down the decision path. Why not do it with micro-conversions?

Give them smaller conversions to accomplish while giving them more information that leads them to the decision to buy from you.

Micro-conversions could be a download of information (say a buyer’s guide or eBook) or it could be an action to get them to engage with your brand so your name stands out during the purchase process.

Optimize for Mobile

Nearly half—48 percent—of all emails are opened on mobile devices, but only 11 percent are optimized for mobile.

Sixty-nine percent of mobile users delete emails not optimized for their phones or tablets. 

One more important stat: Sixty-seven percent of decision makers read their email on mobile devices.

Email Marketing in Different Funnels

Email doesn’t always have to lead to a sale.

Because it’s just one of many touch points in the purchase process, it’s a great way to drive subscribers into another channel, such as social media.

Once they’re in there, you can keep them engaged and have further conversations with them.

This, my friends, is email marketing at its best. Try it, won’t you?

Stefanie Daneau

Stefanie Daneau is the co-founder of Pepper Gang, a recognized digital-marketing firm with a simple vision to maximize client growth by navigating the complex consumer decision cycle in today's hyper-connected world.

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