6 Reasons Your Sales Emails Aren’t Getting Opened
Sales emails are vital in reaching potential customers and driving business growth. However, despite investing time and effort into crafting compelling sales emails, you may be frustrated with low open rates and lackluster results. If you need help capturing your e attention and boosting y’ and your click-through rate, it's time to identify the factors holding you back. In this article, we will explore six crucial reasons why your sales emails may need to be opened, from ineffective subject lines to misaligned targeting in your email marketing campaigns.
Table of Contents
1. Your Subject Line Isn't Convincing
In Ray Edwards's Book, How to Write Copy That Sells, he says that "The headline is the ad for the rest of the ad." The headline's job is to make the reader want to keep reading the rest of the ad.
The same is true for the subject line of your emails. The subject line has one job: to make someone want to open the email and read what it's about. It is a 40-50 character sales pitch.
If your emails are dropping into inboxes and your "sales pitch" to open the email goes something like "Such and such Newsletter" or "This Week's blah blah blah...", I probably wouldn't open it.
One of the primary culprits behind low open rates is the need for more subject lines. Your subject line is your email's first impression, and it decides recipients either open or ignore your message. If your subject lines lack intrigue, need to create urgency, or communicate the value within the email, they will likely be dismissed amidst the flood of other emails in your audience's inbox. We will delve into the art of crafting attention-grabbing subject lines and explore strategies to pique curiosity and entice your target audience to open your sales emails.
The trick to writing effective subject lines for marketing emails is to imagine you are writing to a friend. For example, if you email your brother, sister, or old pal, your subject line may read something more personal, like "Hey, check this out…" or "You're not going to believe this."
It may seem unnatural initially because we've created an illusion of separation between personal and business, but remember that you are writing to people. People associate most naturally with other people.
Could you take a look at your marketing emails?
Are your subject lines enticing?
Do they hint at what's inside without giving it away?
Is your vocabulary short and personal or chock full of industry jargon and "corporate" words?
2. The "From" Address Is Impersonal
When crafting effective sales emails, personalization goes beyond just the subject lines. While personalized subject lines have been widely recognized as crucial in capturing recipients' attention, the "From" address is equally important. Surprisingly, many marketers overlook the impact of an impersonal "From" address on open email rates. Research has shown that an unrelatable or generic "From" address can significantly hinder open rates, leading to lower engagement and conversion rates. To optimize your sales email performance, it's essential to consider the entire email experience, including the "From" address, and ensure it resonates with your target audience.
To understand the significance of a personalized "From" address, it's important to consider the average click-through rate (CTR) for sales emails. According to industry averages, the CTR for sales emails hovers around 2-3%. While subject lines play a significant role in enticing recipients to open emails, an impersonal "From" address can create skepticism or disinterest even if the subject line is compelling. This minor adjustment can significantly affect open email rates, leading to increased engagement and higher chances of driving conversions. By personalizing the "From" address and using a recognizable name or relevant company department, you can establish trust, credibility, and a connection with your target audience.
In my years of owning a coffee roasting company, I sent my list of marketing emails from "Jeff at Batch Nine," and people loved it. I frequently received personal responses to my emails, and even though I'd never met most of them, they felt like they knew me. That personal connection led to more sales but transcended a "transactional" relationship for my list.
Introducing yourself to someone and associating yourself as their point of contact with Your Company humanizes your brand and creates a connection. People love connection.
3. Optimizing Sales Email Timing for Maximum Impact
Timing is a critical factor in optimizing the impact of sales emails. Sending emails at the right moment can significantly increase open rates, engagement, and conversions. Understanding your target audience's behavior and preferences can help determine the optimal timing for your sales emails. For instance, if you're targeting professionals, sending emails during regular business hours when they are actively checking their inboxes can lead to better results. However, it's important to consider your specific industry and target audience's unique characteristics. By analyzing past data, conducting A/B testing, and leveraging email marketing analytics, you can identify the most effective time slots for sending your sales emails, ensuring they have the maximum impact on your recipients.
Fine-tuning your sales email timing strategy can improve open rates, higher engagement, and better results for your email marketing campaigns. The average lifespan of an email in an inbox is relatively short, making timing even more crucial. With busy schedules and overflowing inboxes, catching your recipients' attention is important when they are most likely to engage with your content. By avoiding peak email times when their inbox is flooded with competing messages, you can increase your sales emails' visibility and chances of being noticed. Additionally, considering the geographical location of your target audience can be essential, especially if you have an international or diverse customer base. By optimizing the timing of your sales emails to align with specific time zones and cultural norms, you can enhance the relevance and impact of your messages.
4. Too Little or Too Much: Optimizing Sales Email Frequency
Optimizing the frequency of your sales emails is a crucial aspect of effective email marketing campaigns. Striking the right balance ensures you maintain engagement with your audience without overwhelming them. While the ideal email frequency can vary depending on your specific industry and target audience, it's important to consider the industry average and the average email open rate as guiding metrics.
Sending emails too infrequently may lead to a lack of visibility and missed opportunities while bombarding your audience with excessive emails can result in fatigue and unsubscribes. By carefully monitoring your email analytics and studying your audience's response patterns, you can fine-tune your email frequency to achieve optimal engagement, maximize your email open rate, and drive the desired results.
If you provide consistent value to your list with tips, insights, and more, you can send almost as many emails as you like without sounding special deals, spammy or annoying. If all you do is sell, sell, sell, you can bet that people will quickly be annoyed.
Generally, I suggest sending anywhere from 2-10 emails per month. If you don't have time to create consistent value twice a week, that's okay, but staying in touch with your list is important.
If you email them once every six months and only ask for a sale in those emails, it's not a great recipe for building trust. Email too frequently, and they'll find you annoying and unsubscribe, or worse, mark you as spam.
The key is to find the sweet spot, which lies at the intersection of what your clients want from you and what you can physically handle.
5. Finding the Right Balance: Sales Email Frequency for Effective Marketing
Most humans don't like being sold to and never really have. To buy from someone or some brand, people must feel like they can trust that brand. If you're always selling, you aren't taking the time to build trust.
If every email you send asks them to buy from you, you'll eventually train them to expect that every time they see your name in their inbox. It's a really good way to get ignored. Instead of selling 100% of the time, try sending your list valuable content more often.
Selling is easy. Being valuable is hard. You'll have to get creative, but in the end, the relationships you cultivate with your email list will yield a lot more fruit.
When emails are overtly sales-focused, several factors can contribute to low open rates. Firstly, recipients are increasingly wary of promotional content inundating their inboxes and are quick to dismiss emails that appear solely focused on selling. Secondly, the lack of personalization and relevance in sales-pitched emails fails to resonate with the target audience, resulting in disengagement. Additionally, subject lines that sound overly salesy or spammy can deter recipients from opening emails.
To combat these challenges and improve email open rates, it's crucial to adopt a more customer-centric approach. You can foster a stronger connection with your audience by shifting the focus from pure sales pitches to delivering value, relevant content, and personalized experiences. Crafting subject lines that pique curiosity, avoiding excessive sales language, and providing actionable insights or solutions can greatly enhance your emails' appeal and open rates. Remember, the goal is to build trust, establish credibility, and genuinely engage with your recipients, leading to increased open rates, higher engagement, and, ultimately, more successful email marketing campaigns. Try some of these ideas for nurturing email content:
Answer their questions,
Ask for feedback,
Show "behind the scenes",
Share testimonials,
Share your inspirations,
Teach them something valuable,
And so much more.
6. Not Mobile Optimized
With a significant portion of email recipients accessing their emails on mobile devices, non-mobile optimized emails can have a detrimental effect on open rates. Emails that are not optimized for mobile devices often appear distorted, difficult to read, or require excessive scrolling, resulting in a poor user experience.
Frustrated recipients are likelier to delete or ignore such emails, leading to lower open rates. To maximize open rates, it is essential to ensure that your emails are mobile-friendly, with responsive designs, clear formatting, and easily clickable links or buttons.
By delivering a seamless and visually appealing experience across different devices, you can enhance the likelihood of recipients opening and engaging with your emails, ultimately driving the success of your email marketing campaigns. Mobile optimization used to be something you could do. Now it's something you must do. Hubspot reported in 2020 that 46% of all emails are now opened on mobile.
What do emails that aren't optimized for mobile look like?
Super small text
Tiny links
Pictures cut off
Half of your customers may be opening your emails on their smartphones. If the emails you send them aren't fine-tuned to look great on their phones immediately, there's a solid chance they won't take the time to read what you have to say.
Fortunately, most email CRMs these days make mobile optimization easy. Just make sure you take the time to double-check before you click send. You may have already invested much time into your email marketing strategy and seen very little success. But if people aren't engaging with your emails, don't let it dash your hopes.
Email marketing works - you need to make some changes. This list of 6 isn't comprehensive, but if you follow these six principles in your emails, you'll be headed in the right direction. Above all, remember that the people you are writing emails to are just that...people. Write to people, not a list, and most of these things will fall into place!
By Jeff Felten
Guest Contributor & Founder of Content Remedy
