Why Your Subscribers May Not Be Reading Your E-Mail Marketing
E-mail has become a familiar part of almost everyone’s daily routine now, and using e-mail to market your business is the cyber equivalent of delivering advertising brochures by snail mail. Internet marketers generally put a high value on a company’s list of e-mail subscribers because they are a target audience that has already shown an interest in the business by opting in to the e-mail list in the first place. As big as your e-mail list might be, it is only as good as the number of subscribers that actually read the e-mails that you send them. If you are not getting much of a return from your e-mail marketing efforts it might just be that your subscribers aren’t reading them.
Part of the reason may just be the sheer number of e-mails that people receive now. There are 2.8 million e-mails sent every second or about 240 billion every day1and the average corporate user receives over one hundred every day2. To deal with that flow of messages, most of us have a means for sifting out the ones that we don’t read for one reason or another and the key to successful e-mail marketing is to be one of the messages that isn’t deleted.
There are a number of reasons why people don’t open e-mail marketing messages, with the main one (61%) being that they are not interested. Surprisingly, 45% of people don’t open e-mails because they get too many messages from that particular business, while around a third say that they get too many e-mails in general or that they are too busy3. In contrast to this, 64% of people say that they open marketing e-mails specifically because of the organization that it has been sent by, and 47% say that the subject line influences them to open e-mails, while one quarter open a marketing e-mail because of the offer that it is making3. All of this shows that people are willing to open the e-mails that they are interested in no matter how busy they are, so long as there is some benefit to them from doing so.
If you suspect that your marketing e-mails aren’t being opened then it might be a good idea to go back and look at what you did to encourage your subscribers to opt in to begin with. The top reason why people subscribe to e-mail lists is to receive discounts and special offers, while over one third did so to take part in a specific promotion. Only around a quarter subscribe so that they can stay informed or to be able to access exclusive content, and slightly less than that number subscribe to show their support for the business3. If you built your e-mail list with promotions or by offering discounts for signing up then you might need to use the same tactic to get your subscribers to keep reading your newsletters.
The subject line is obviously important when it comes to enticing a recipient to open your e-mail and you need to make sure that your offer and the benefits of taking it up are clearly stated in it. Don’t flood your list with e-mails, and do some tests of different e-mailing schedules to find the one that works for you. Make sure that your content is always valuable to your readers so that they are more likely to look forward to seeing e-mails from you in their inbox in the morning. E-mail marketing can be the most productive internet marketing avenue open to business and if yours isn’t working for you then InfintechDesigns.com can help to get it on track again.
References:
1. http://www.scienceillustrated.com/technology/2011/10/how-many-e-mails-day
2. 2011 Chadwick Martin Bailey Consumer Pulse
