5 Reasons Your Sales Emails Get Ignored

Just about every successful company uses email marketing as a component of their overall marketing strategy, but few get it right on their first try. These early frustrations, however, typically lead to insights that enable them to increase email open rates.

In other words: they get it right by first getting it wrong. So, if you are holding your head in your hand while looking at abysmal open rates, recognize this moment as an opportunity to learn the way forward. Here are some ideas you can consider as to why your open rates may be bad, and some recommendations for how to increase email open rates.

You’re Not Including Video

Video has been proven to boost email open rates by 19%, click throughs by 65% and lower “unsubscribe” rates by 26%. Including a video in your email and making note of it in the subject line provides a powerful reason for your recipient to click.

You can personalize your video for even greater effect, providing a 1:1 conversation with information tailored just towards your lead. Using a cloud-based sales video hosting platform like 2Win! Bridge enables you to also deliver a more curated experience. You can easily share links, queue up additional content and view granular stats, like the number of shares and the portion of the video watched by each viewer. Your recipient enjoys more engaging content through video, and you have greater control over the outcome compared to hosting video on a generic platform like Youtube.

Not Thinking About Subject Lines

Many companies treat email subject lines like blog headlines or generic marketing copy. Don’t! Subject lines are their own animal, and they require a special set of considerations. Firstly, preview your subject lines using a tool like this one in order to see them how your recipients see them. Limit your character use to 40-50 at most, and ensure that you are adding a preview sentence before the header in order to give your recipient an idea of what’s inside.

Test a variety of approaches, and be mindful of terms like “sale”, “free”, “winner”, or “offer” that can trigger spam filters. Try to think of the types of subject lines that you would click on, and bring in social media data to help inform what could drive engagement.

You’re Not Carefully Managing Your Subscriber List

20% of emails don’t reach their intended inbox for one reason or another. A chief reason is that subscriber lists are out of date or unsegmented. Emails that “hard bounce” and return unopened increase the likelihood that the sender will be flagged as a spammer, so maintain your lists diligently for clean, up-to-date and accurate rolls.

Because subscriber curation is such an important component of email marketing, you should also be wary of purchasing lead email lists unless they have been thoroughly vetted. Segment your lead to obtain higher open rates, as well. Segmenting your campaign can increase open rates by 14% by positioning assets to be as relevant as possible.

You’re Devoid of Personality

Being professional doesn’t mean you have to be boring! You can shake up your approach through different possible tones that aim to get the recipient’s attention. One approach is humor. Email tends to be dry and business-y, so a clever pun or humorous approach that gives someone a chuckle stands out. You can also try being more dramatic and entertaining. One marketer found a huge amount of success by turning his email into a funny dialogue told in a script format, something he called “The Hollywood Approach.”

The key is to break out of your “same-old” mindset and apply creativity to try something new. Stand out to get clicked!

Other Possible Issues When Trying to Increase Email Open Rates

• Ensure your message has a clear CTA; people don’t like reading emails with no clear purpose
• 65% of emails are opened via mobile, so make all formatting mobile responsive
• Experiment with timing to get the best open rate; some segments may have different habits than others, e.g. early morning email checkers versus end-of-day.

So, now that we have revealed our own secrets to getting better email open rates, what are yours? Share your killer techniques and eye-opening anecdotes below.