Surprising us time and again, Email Marketing just refuses to fade away. In fact, the number of email users worldwide is forecasted to rise to 2.9 billion by 2019. As the audience, all of us have been receiving marketing emails since the beginning of time. And as marketers? Well, we know we’re all fans of how Email Marketing works. But does it always work? Is it working for you? If yes, then can it be better? If no, then what’s wrong?

Let’s look at the 7 reasons why Email Marketing might not be working for you:

1. You’re Neglecting the Intelligence

Be it on the web or off of it, data is a huge part of every business. While intelligently gathering and using data for business can help one achieve their marketing goals, neglecting the same is a loss of intelligence. This is one issue with most companies these days. They claim to be data-driven, but are actually just implementing the same ideas and strategies over and over again. As a result, they fail to innovate and grow.

The solution to this is a more positive approach. Betting a lot at stake can be risky, we know it. Turns out, it’s needed at times. That’s what A/B testing revolves around. You try a set of settings. Observe how those perform. Create a new set of different settings. Observe how those perform. And keep going on like that.

For instance, let us say you created and tested 10 such sets of settings. Some of these settings will result in a good open rate, some will boost your click-through rate and some might increase the number of sales. All in all, at the end of these campaigns, you will have data from 10 different settings/ideas/strategies. This data will help you understand which ideas worked the best for you. Then, you can use this information to further optimize all your Email Marketing campaigns incorporating the best combinations of settings.

Read More: 50 Email Marketing Best Practices 

2. Your Email List is not Refined

Can you recall the last time you cleaned your email list? Every email list in the world has subscribers grouped under different categories:

• Confirmed
• Unconfirmed
• DNC list (Do Not Contact)
• Bounced

While we send more and more emails to our active subscribers, turns out we’re reaching out to a highly skimmed user base. But that is also fine. That’s just how every email list works. And ‘the bigger, the better’ will always hold true for email lists. But with quantity, quality matters too.

Let me tell you, your Email Service Provider charges you for every single email that you send. So, sending out to the people who don’t want to see your mails or have not responded to them in a long time might be costing you money unnecessarily. What you can do instead is invest that money in collecting more emails and reaching out to those. Just analyze and take action. Clear your email list for qualified subscribers. Those who are interested in your product.

3. You Need Better Mail Copies

While we all try to persuade our users with our content, there is a whole bunch of competitors trying their luck at the same. A total of 205 billion emails were sent every day in 2015. What magic do you think your email copy holds to get more clicks? Ask yourself. How many emails do you receive in a day? How many of those do you actually open? And how many of those do you go on to read?

Reality check? Eh! Well, that’s just everyone. The problem is that we all dig content which just talks to us. If you observe, you’ll realize that we click on an email when its subject line is compelling or totally unique. And then we read it further if it at least seems to cater to our needs.

Conclusion? Write better email copies.

While copywriting is a science which is yet being discovered, there are a few factors which all the successful email campaigns have in common.

Let us look at the four ‘U’s of email copywriting.

1. Start with urgency. All of us are always on the go. Never wanting to waste any of our time. And never wanting to do something ‘right now,’ until highly necessary. But do we say no to the urgent calls?If you can evoke a sense of urgency in the readers’ minds, you can attain the attention of a higher number of readers.

This simply works like the readers being picky about what they click and not wanting to miss out on good opportunities at the same time. For example, we hardly stall emails which seem to provide a limited term benefit.

Think yourself, you want to buy a fruit blender. You visited a website to read reviews about the model that you are considering to buy and signed up to their newsletter. The next noon you receive a mail offering a considerable limited time discount on your choice of a blender. Would you let it slip? That’s how it works. Evoke a sense of urgency and be useful, the readers will follow.

2. The next characteristic of a highly clickable email is uniqueness. As discussed above, we receive a huge number of emails every day. But we don’t click open all of them. But when we see something unique in our inbox, we want to know more, right?

The same applies to our readers as well. Understand this and try to keep your email copies unique. If you stand out, chances are you’ll get more clicks. For further understanding, let us take an example of the email subject line by Warby Parker,

“Uh-oh, your prescription is expiring”

A mail with this subject line was sent to the users whose prescription was expiring. This was an email reminder to remind them to renew their prescription. The best thing was that it targeted a specific audience’s interest. Result? Users who want to renew their prescription will click open this mail and read details. One unique headline idea to attract users’ attention.

3. Evoking a sense of urgency and being unique works to get the readers to click your email. To make them read through your copy, you need to cater to their ultra-specific problem. Nobody in the world can know your customers better than you. (maybe your competitors can, but you do that too, right?)

How about making use of this knowledge? If you know your consumers’ right, you would know the problems, which they generally face. If you succeed in talking about those problems, you’ll be talking straight to every single user facing that ultra-specific problem. That’s where the relatability kicks in. You know how a joke becomes surprisingly funny when you can relate to it? It works the same way.

As users, we like being understood better. The moment your emails turn ultra-specific to your users’ needs, you get more readers going through your emails.

4. And after you have started talking straight to your users, you need to make sure that you are being useful. How is it different from being ultra-specific? Well, being ultra-specific means understanding your users’ problems and talking about those. Being useful means providing solutions to those. It’s highly important, because what’s the point of just talking about a problem and not solving it? We know that writing great email copies might take up more time and require brainstorming. Turns out, it is really important as you compete with the whole world of businesses sending mails to each of your prospects.

Tip: Try incorporating more visual content in your emails. Emails with visual content get a higher CTR.

Read More: Five Strategies to Boost Donor Retention Using Email Marketing

4. Your CTAs or Landing Pages are Weak

You spent hours brainstorming about the right design and copy for your Email Marketing campaign. You rolled out the mails and even got a higher email click-through resulting in more people to read. But in the end, it failed to convert more. What can be the reason? Once you get a reader to go through your entire email, you have achieved something precious. This something needs to be preserved and leveraged.

How? First, with an adequate CTA in your email. Second, with the right landing page. Talking about the CTA, marketers often make a mistake here. Being too generic or implying work through your CTAs can turn your users off. Readers are smart. The last thing they want on their desks is ‘work’. So, you know why a CTA copy saying “Read More”, “Learn More”, “Call Now” etc., might not be your best bet?

What you can do is come up with more actionable alternatives. For example, instead of saying “Read More”, try saying “Find out more”. We all love to find new useful stuff, don’t we? Doesn’t mean we are always in a mood to read. Asking to read more in such a case will repel the readers. And once the right CTA copy is created you should start getting more clicks, leading the users to your landing page.

From getting users to click open your email to getting them to your landing page is an accomplishment. (Yayy! Mini achievement.) But that’s not it. There is a next step to this process. Crafting your perfect landing page. While all the efforts done by now are at stake, coming up with a converting landing page becomes crucial. But how to do it? Here are some tips.

• Work on your headlines. The first thing a landing page (or any webpage for that matter) can attract users with is the headline. If you fail at the headline, chances are you’ve already lost the reader. So, whenever you create a headline for your landing page, make sure it grabs the readers’ attention. Tell the readers about your product or service. And do not exceed 20 words at max (preferable limit is 10). Create a crisp and actionable headline keeping the above ideas in mind and move ahead optimizing your landing page further.
• Persuade with subheadings. While headlines are really important, subheadings are too. While you create a persuasive subheading, here is what you need to keep in mind: proceed with details in your subheadings. A subheading is generally supposed to be more informative/in-depth than the main heading. Make it have information gaps. How it works? You make a point, which you discuss later. Maybe in the end of the content followed by that subheading. This keeps the users intrigued till the end of that particular section.
• Right use of visuals. We all know how important visuals are for a landing page. No wonder, all amazing landing pages have at least one of them. But how to pick the right one for yourself? And then how to place it on your landing page? Let us find out everything your landing page picture should be.

— Large in size.

— Highly relevant to your product/service.

— High quality.

— Highly intriguing and attention-grabbing.

• Perfect explanation of your product and plan in a few words is the next requisite which your landing page must have. Don’t take up a lot of space. Try to be as concise as possible. Just understand that it is crucial to talk to the readers and tell them you know their needs. Write a crisp explanation and roll it out.Elements that you can add to this can highly affect your users’ response. For example, it will be a good idea to make it easy and fun to read.As it has to be short, you won’t have much time to entertain or retain the readers. Crafting good landing pages and CTAs is highly crucial for any marketing campaign. And when it is email, it becomes more challenging. Definitely, something which needs sheer attention to come up with.

5. Something can be wrong with your offer

If nothing else before this step worked, tweaking your offer might be your next best bet.

“Mediocre copy and a good offer will out-pull great copy and a mediocre offer any day of the week. Make a good offer and if your grammar is incorrect, if your spelling is bad, or even if you have orange type on a green background, it could still work.”

– Breakthrough Copywriting by David Garfinkel

You understand how it works? Try to get into your prospects’ shoes. While looking forward to making a purchase, will you look for great grammar or a great offer? As simple as it gets, make them an offer they can’t refuse.

6. Same Email for All your Lists? Rethink Maybe?

Take it like this. You wrote a great email. Everything on point. Great design. Amazing CTA. Best landing page you’ve ever created. A brilliant offer. And still a low conversion rate? Well, maybe I got you here. This happens with the best of us.

The one problem which most of us overlook at the start is how optimization in marketing works. Every marketing campaign in the digital world is targeted. Be it a Facebook ads campaign or a Google Adwords one or even an Email Marketing campaign. For better results and optimal settings, it needs to be targeted.

Your best bet is to sort email lists and send emails according to their interests. For example, your company might be selling beard oil for men and a face-wash gel for women. You can roll out mails to your female audiences endorsing your face-wash gel for women and try selling the beard oil to their fathers or husbands or even male friends. But sending out same mails to all of them (women and men; or other different demographics in your business) would just equal be to throwing money for nothing.

Read More: 4 Pro Tips on How to Succeed with your Email Marketing Campaigns

7. Your Leads Lack Quality

Okay. I said it. If solving any of the above problems didn’t help you convert more, the problem might be persistent in the roots of it. Leads. That’s where it starts.

You might have spent hefty amounts creating an email list hoping to make a mint selling your products or services to the masses. Turns out your ‘masses’ can be inactive, fake, not relevant or not interested in your industry at all or simply be lost in any other way. The crux is, they are lost for you and would hardly be of any use.

How to deal with this? I know it sucks to have thousands of email subscribers in your list while none of them convert. What you can do is be highly specific to your users. Analyze their behavior and know what they actually desire from your product/services. Come up with content ideas which directly cater to their interests or answer their queries and propose to them a sweet sign-up form just when it’s the right time.

This whole thing, when done right, will bring you great results in the form of qualified leads. In the end, leads are where Email Marketing starts from.

Final words

While email marketing is a great way of connecting with your users and selling to your prospects, a great email campaign doesn’t create itself. In order to convert more with your Email Marketing campaign, you need to understand how things work with emails.

The world is always on the go. Boring blocks of text in mails don’t work. The subject line can greatly affect your email campaign. A great email copy abides by the four ‘U’s of copywriting. With an inadequate CTA, you are losing more than just users. Without the right landing page, making a sell is a fading fantasy. And the list goes on.

We understand it’s tough, but then it’s crucial too. Aiding to that, we tried to help our readers with this article. We hope this helps you game up your Email Marketing campaign and boost conversions.

Read More: Have Your Best Email Marketing Year Ever by Focusing on Engagement