Why People Aren't Reading Your Emails

If you are like me, chances are one of the first things you do to start your morning is to sort all your email from all the spam and clutter.  While it's an annoying process, you can't help but think if your emails are being treated by recipients in the same way as those "Miracle Blue Pill", "Discount Pharmaceutical" and "Nigerian Business Partner" emails.  It's a scary thought, but what can you do about it?

eMarketer just came out with a study to determine what strategies businesses are taking to increase their open rates.  It appears one of  the study's focal point had to do with Behavioral Targeting, which is simply the idea of targeting emails based on previous open rates.  As you can see below, over 75% of businesses feel that behavioral targeting will at least moderately improve their open rates.

To determine the open rates of the emails you send out, you should use an email marketing service (i.e. GetResponse, AWeber, etc.) or tool that allows you to track such things.

Aside from behavioral targeting though, what else can you do to increase the open rates of your emails?  Here are a few other strategies you can use to help make your emails stand out in recipients' inboxes:

1. Plain Text Vs. HTML Emails: If you send emails to people that have fancy fonts, graphics or colors, you are sending them HTML emails.  HTML emails are like web pages: they require code to make them look nice.  Unfortunately, this code can have a tendency of either automatically getting your emails blocked by spam filters, or the code will show when recipients open them, thus making them extremely difficult to read.  In either case, chances are the recipient will just delete it.  Even though Plain Text Emails do not allow you to decorate them, you won't have to deal with any code issues.
2. Personalize: When writing an email, make sure to personalize it as much as you can.  Use their names, write about topics that matter to them, and anything else that will tell the recipient that the email was made for them.
3. Better Subject Lines: The most important part of your email is the subject, as it will determine whether or not the recipient will open it.  Use the recipient's name in the subject as well as something that will stimulate their curiosity.
4. Special Offers: If you can provide a special gift or discount, make sure to talk about that as well.  Just make sure to not blatantly promote it, as recipients may mistaken it as spam.
5. Split-Testing: Split-testing is the idea of constantly testing the performance of two (or more) samples and keeping the one that performs the best.  It can be implemented on virtually anything, as the purpose of this is to continuously improve your campaign.

In the end, while reevaluating your email campaign using these ideas will likely help increase your open rates, there are other alternatives to communicating with your audience as well.  After all, with last year's Nielsen Report showing more people are using social networks than email, there are a wide array of channels you can use to communicate with your current contacts as well as new ones.