Why Your Readers Are Not Engaging with Your Emails: 1

Why Your Readers Are Not Engaging with Your Emails: 1

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Not Engaging with Your Emails

Maybe your email campaigns are not going exactly as you had hoped. You lack the responses and clickthroughs that would increase your revenue consistently over time. Or maybe your email campaigns used to be more effective but over time you have lost subscribers and open rates have dropped.

We've made a list of potential email issues to look out for in your campaigns. The critical reason your emails are not gaining the interaction of your subscribers may be listed below.

1. Your subject line doesn't capture attention.

The subject line is generally the first part of your email that your subscribers see. If they are scrolling through their inbox and they don't see a subject line that interests them, often subscribers will simply click delete. If you can't even get subscribers to open your emails, then all the hard work you put into your email content will be for naught.

The key to crafting a subject line that will engage subscribers is to give them a clear idea of the benefits they will receive by opening the email, while leaving a bit of a mystery to entice them to click. For example, "Your Personalized Half Off Coupon is Inside" or "5 of the Best and Easiest Holiday Recipes."

2. Your content preview is not compelling.

Many email programs now offer a brief preview of the content inside your email. This means that you need to capture subscribers' attention with your very first sentence. The first content in many emails is "Having troubles seeing this email? Click here to view the email online." Totally boring and standard. If you saw this in an email's preview, would you be compelled to open it?

Try to make your email preview and the first line of your email interesting. If you only have one sentence to engage a subscriber, how will you do it? "You know what it's like to stuff a holiday turkey. Here is a faster, easier way to do it."

3. Your content is not effective.

Creating awesome email content is not easy. A good template helps, and many email editors offer professionally designed pre-made templates that you can use.

A theme enables you to tie content together. Examples of themes would be specific holidays, sports, seasons, food and drink and so on. Having a theme makes your content flow together, making it easier and more fun to read.

Another simple way to engage subscribers is to offer a promotion! Including a promotion, discount or coupon greatly increases the amount of subscribers who will open and respond to take advantage of the offer.

4. Something is affecting your email delivery.

There are many things that can affect email deliverability. If you don't have a good online reputation, if your IP address is on a blacklist, if you are sending to contacts who have not subscribed, if you haven't updated your email list in a long time or if you're not using a good email sending solution your deliverability will suffer.

Deliverability may also be hindered by what is actually in your email. Subject lines with certain spam words will often trigger spam filters and stop your email from getting through. Learn what types of spam words and phrases to avoid in your subject lines. Including a video in your email is almost guaranteed to trigger spam filters. Having a lot of images in your email is not a good idea either and will also slow down delivery.

5. Your email list needs some updating.

It's tempting to want to keep old subscribers on the list forever. We know it's a challenge to recruit new subscribers, but did you know that if your email list is old it will actually make your email campaigns less effective? If you don't regularly clean your email lists, you risk sending to old email addresses that are no longer active. These addresses become spam traps, so it's a good idea to check your reports regularly to see which addresses hard bounced your emails.

Then there's the subscribers once wanted your emails but no longer do and just have not bothered to unsubscribe. Legally it's alright to send to these subscribers in most cases, but realistically you're wasting your time and money. Send a re-engagement email asking old subscribers to confirm that they still wish to be on your email list. If you do not receive a response, remove them from your list. They're not reading your emails anyway!

Older subscribers are often not as engaged as new subscribers. They may have grown accustomed to your emails and now simply ignore them. Maybe you haven't updated your email content in a way to keep it interesting to regular readers. There are ways to re-engage your email subscribers, which we will explore in "Why Your Readers are Not Engaging with Your Emails: Part 2."

Try an awesome email solution for free.

Email automation saves time and enables you to segment lists for personal targeting. Sign up for a 14 day free trial of the SimplyCast platform, which includes email marketing. If you want to see it in action, check out an interactive demo with our friendly team.

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