Why Aren’t Your Marketing Emails Working?

If email distribution is not at the front and center of your marketing strategy, then it should be. It has the potential to deliver a massive return on investment, turn prospects into customers, and encourage current customers to purchase more and more often from you. It is a relatively inexpensive tool that can pay off with extremely high returns on investment. If you are already consistently sending out marketing emails, but you aren’t seeing the results you want or think you should be seeing, then you may not be using this tool to its full effect.

Email distribution should be helping you generate sales and increase your revenue. If it isn’t, then one of the reasons below may be why.

Your email distribution list is out of date

One of the most important email basics that you need to know is that your list is just as important as the emails themselves. Yes, your emails need to look great. Yes, you need clear, engaging, and compelling messaging. But you also need to be sending that messaging to the right people. If you’re not, then all that work you put into email distribution is pretty much for nothing.

For our clients, we find that about 30% of a list goes bad every year. You might still see that you have X number of email addresses in your database, but without proper maintenance and additions, around 30% of those addresses may no longer be useful to you. People get fired and change jobs, departments get reshuffled, emails change, and more, so a lot a of your emails are either no longer being viewed, or the wrong people are looking at them.

Your emails aren’t being opened

Another one of the key email basics is that if people aren’t opening your emails, then they aren’t going to help you generate any sales. Once you get your email distribution list under control and are consistently adding the right kinds of contacts to it, then you have to think about how to convince those contacts to take a minute to open your message. For marketing emails, that comes down to the subject line.

The first step is to make it past the spam filters for the email providers. To avoid having the emails stopped by the filters, try not to use words like "sale", "free", or "deal”. Plus, you shouldn’t use all caps or exclamation points. These words and symbols will often automatically trigger your email to end up in the recipient’s spam folder.

What you want to do is give the reader a little taste of the value they will receive if they open your email. Subject lines that ask a question or indicate there is helpful information inside will have much higher open rates. Adding urgency can also help you stand out, so don't be afraid to mention limited time offers. You can also tease a tip or advice that will be in the message, so the recipient doesn’t automatically think you are just trying to sell to them.

It's important to not mislead the reader or oversell what they will get by looking at your message. Doing so can lead to unsubscribes and angry customers.

Your marketing emails don’t look professional

Although it is relatively easy to create an email nowadays using various services or platforms, it is not that easy to make them look professional and to create compelling messaging. The simple fact is that it is pretty obvious when an email was put together by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. And if your messaging doesn’t look, sound, and feel professional, then people most likely won’t be receptive to whatever offers it contains. Worse yet, they may not take your brand seriously after receiving an unprofessional email. The stakes are high.

You’ve invested time and money into developing your email distribution list, and you have people who want to receive your emails and will likely be receptive to their messaging. So invest a little more by having your marketing emails professionally developed. Your ROI will be more than worth it.

You’re only sending out promotional emails

Crucial among the email basics is to vary the content that you send out. Many companies will make the mistake of only sending out promotional messaging to their email distribution list. You should definitely be directly highlighting your products and services in your emails, but you should also be sharing industry best practices, advice, news, new developments, and interesting information about your company. Provide value independent of your products and services, and prospects will begin to trust you and your brand. That way, when they are ready to purchase something, they will think of you.

Email marketing analytics

If you’re making any of the mistakes we listed, then fix the mistake and start doing things differently. But as you move forward and try to improve your list, subject lines, and messaging, measure how effective your changes are by looking at email metrics. Look at open rates and click through rates, but also look at more important numbers like purchase frequency and revenue growth.

Although those numbers might not seem like email marketing analytics, if you’re doing emails the right way, then customers should be purchasing more from you, and your revenue should be increasing. For example, at Winsby, our clients’ customers who we send emails to purchase two to three times more often than those customers who don’t receive the emails. There should be a clear and traceable growth in your revenue if you are doing email distribution the right way. The only way you’ll know for sure is by looking at the email metrics and tracking customers’ purchases related to your email list.

If you have any questions about email distribution, or you want to start sending out highly effective emails right now and avoid the learning curve, contact the Winsby team today. We back up everything we do by sharing the email marketing analytics with you after each message, so you know it’s working!