Marketing Emails Not Getting Opened? Try These 4 Tips!

So you spend all this time writing and designing what you think are creative and informative email campaigns … but no one is opening them. What gives?

Email marketing remains a powerful tool for small business owners like you to reach both current and prospective customers. But if you can’t get people to open your emails, you’re not going to make much of an impact.

Here are some of the most common issues that drive down email open rates.

Your emails aren’t optimized for mobile

Have you noticed that our smartphones are being used more and more for their smart side rather than their phone side? Email plays a huge role in smartphone usage. The latest numbers predict that by the end of this year, roughly 8 out of 10 email users will be checking email exclusively from their smartphones. Unless you optimize for mobile, your email could wind up looking wonky. And when that happens, 70% of people will just toss it right into the trash. Don’t let your emails end up in the trash — optimize those emails for mobile.

Your subject lines aren’t great

Fact: 47% of email recipients will open an email based solely on the subject line. Subject lines are, essentially, headlines for your emails. So they’ve got to be good. Your subject line should do two things. First, it needs to give the user a sneak peak of what they’ll find inside if they open it. And second, it has to make it sound like it’s worth opening. So how do you do that? Well, it just so happens we wrote up an entire blog post about that here: How to Write Email Subject Lines That Will Actually Get Clicked.

Your segmentation is poor

Sending every email to every customer in your list just doesn’t email marketing make. It’s just lazy. Consumers want content that is customized to them. If you keep sending emails that aren’t interesting or relevant to them, not only will your customers not open them, but they’ll probably unsubscribe. That’s the last thing you want! Really take the time to sift through your email list and segment your audience. You can group them by their demographics, purchase history, interests, online behavior, etc. Just watch. The more targeted you get when choosing who gets which email campaigns, the better your open rate will be.

Your emails are landing in the spam folder

This is pretty much your worst-case scenario. Our inboxes are smarter than ever, and they’re all about cracking down on spam. Usually if a user ignores multiple emails from you over time, their inbox will assume they don’t want to hear from you. So to the spam folder you go! You also have to be careful with how you’re managing your list — no buying email addresses! — or you could get blacklisted. That’s a one-way ticket to spam, by the way. Your best chance to avoid getting flagged is to create great content, send responsibly and obey the rules.

Looking for more digital marketing tips to help grow your business? Our blog is full of them. Here are some of our top posts to get you started: