Your Emails Aren‘t Getting Opened? It Might Be Because You‘re Making These 3 Mistakes

You put a lot of thought and effort into crafting the perfect email – the subject line is attention-grabbing yet tasteful, the body copy is concise yet compelling, the CTA is clear and motivating. You hit send, sit back, and wait for the opens, clicks, and replies to come rolling in.

Except…they don‘t. A few hours pass, then a few days, and the engagement metrics are dismal – or worse, non-existent. What went wrong?

If your carefully crafted emails are being ignored, you‘re not alone. Research from Zipstripe shows that the average email open rate across industries is just 21.3% – meaning nearly 4 out of 5 emails are never even opened, let alone read or acted upon.

But fear not – in most cases, poor email engagement is due to a few common mistakes that can be fixed with the right knowledge and a little effort. Before you send your next campaign, make sure you‘re not falling victim to these top three reasons people ignore emails:

1. Your Subject Line Doesn‘t Cut Through the Noise

The average office worker receives 121 business emails per day. That‘s a lot of competition for attention in the inbox. If your subject line doesn‘t immediately grab the recipient and compel them to open, your email is likely to be scrolled past and forgotten.

So what makes a subject line stand out? Let‘s look at some data. Analysis of over 115 million emails by Convince & Convert found that the top performing subject lines had these traits in common:

• Brevity: Subject lines with 10 or fewer characters had an open rate of 58%
• Urgency: Subject lines that created a sense of FOMO or timeliness, such as "tonight only" or "24-hour giveaway," increased opens by 22%
• Personalization: Including the recipient‘s first name in the subject line boosted opens by 18.3% on average
• Relevance: Subject lines closely related to the audience‘s interests or pain points performed 11% better
• Uniqueness: Creative, eye-catching subject lines that looked different from the rest of the inbox generated 26% more opens

Top performing email subject line traits (Image source: Convince & Convert)

Great subject lines are an art and a science. Along with following the data-backed best practices above, it‘s worth noting that the most effective subject lines take into account the unique traits and preferences of your specific audience.

For example, research by Phrasee found that for retail and ecommerce brands, emojis in subject lines increased opens by as much as 45%, while B2B audiences tended to prefer straightforward, emoji-free subject lines. Similarly, Mailchimp found that personalized subject lines worked well for its B2C users, but had a negative impact on open rates for B2B.

The takeaway? Test, test, test. Constantly experiment with new subject lines, and pay close attention to your own audience‘s behaviors and benchmarks to find out what works best for your particular brand and customer base. Tools like Touchstone allow you to score your subject lines based on AI analysis of billions of previous email interactions.

2. Your Emails Don‘t Speak Directly to the Reader

No one likes feeling like just another name in a massive database. If your email sounds like it could have been sent to anyone, it‘s much less likely to resonate.

Experian found that personalized emails generated 6X higher revenue than generic emails. Even more tellingly, 52% of customers say they‘ll find somewhere else to go if an email looks like generic advertising.

Personalization goes way beyond just using the recipient‘s name. True one-to-one email marketing takes into account everything you know about the individual – their demographics, their location, their past brand interactions and purchases, the links they‘ve clicked, the content they‘ve viewed on your site.

Thanks to the wealth of data available through platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, and Mailchimp, it‘s easier than ever to segment your lists and personalize your emails based on a wide range of criteria. You can send automated yet highly targeted emails to recipients at different stages of the customer journey, or in response to specific triggers and behaviors.

For example, let‘s say you‘re a SaaS company and you identify a segment of high-value trial users who haven‘t yet converted to paid. You could send them a personalized email with a dynamic content block that highlights features they haven‘t tried yet based on their actual product usage data.

Or, if you‘re an ecommerce brand with customers‘ purchase history and browsing behavior, you could send ultra-targeted emails with personalized product recommendations, replenishment reminders for consumable items, or special offers for products they‘ve viewed but haven‘t yet bought.

Of course, all of this data-driven personalization requires having accurate, comprehensive information about your email recipients in the first place. Along with the usual form fields like name and email address, consider progressive profiling to gradually collect other key details through website behavior, gated content, quizzes, surveys, and additional form fields.

3. Your Emails Don‘t Provide Clear Value

This may seem painfully obvious, but it‘s shocking how many emails fail to answer the reader‘s most pressing question: "What‘s in it for me?"

Your email should provide a specific benefit, solve a problem, or enhance the life of the recipient in a tangible way. And it should communicate that value proposition loud and clear from the very first line.

Scannability is paramount. Multiple studies have found that the ideal email length for click-through rates is between 50-125 words. Constant Contact found that emails with about 20 lines of text had the highest click-through rates at 16%, compared to just 5% for emails with more than 10 images or 30 lines of text.

In other words, keep it short and sweet. Use bolded subheadings, bullet points, images, and plenty of white space to break up blocks of text and draw the reader‘s eye to your main message. Put the most important content near the top, and make your CTA buttons unmissable.

Take this email from Asana as an example:

Email from Asana with clear value proposition and CTA (Image source: Really Good Emails)

In just a few sentences, it conveys two compelling value propositions (organize your to-dos, hit your goals) and provides a clear CTA to start a free trial. The clean layout and bold colors guide the reader to the most important information without excessive text.

If you have a complex message to get across, try distilling it into a single, powerful statement, and link to a blog post or landing page where readers can get more details. And whenever possible, show instead of tell – include images, videos, or interactive content that demonstrates your value proposition at a glance.

The more quickly and clearly your email conveys its value to the recipient, the more likely they are to engage with and act on your message.

TL;DR: Be Relevant, Be Personal, Be Valuable

At the end of the day, getting your emails opened and read comes down to sending the right message to the right person at the right time. Batch and blast, one-size-fits-all emails simply don‘t cut it anymore in today‘s overcrowded inboxes.

Instead, focus on using data to segment your audience and personalize your emails as much as possible. Spend time crafting subject lines that grab attention, but also accurately represent the contents of the email. And above all, make sure every email provides clear value to the recipient and communicates that value quickly and compellingly.

It‘s a lot to keep in mind, but the payoff is worth it. DMA found that segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all email-driven revenue, and marketers have seen revenue increases of up to 760% from segmented campaigns.

Invest in the tools, data, and processes to send highly personalized, relevant, valuable emails, and you‘ll soon see your open and engagement rates soar. Happy sending!