Why Your Marketing Emails Have Low Open Rates

Email marketing has long been a cornerstone of digital marketing. It’s inexpensive, it’s often very effective, and it’s not incredibly time-consuming. Of course, it requires specific skills and strategic planning to make your emails as effective as they can be, and you can tell whether they’re working based on your email platform’s metrics.

One metric that can signal a problem is your open rate for each email – the percentage of recipients who opened the email. If your open rate is lower than you would like it to be, your emails aren’t being viewed by as many patients or customers so they’re making a smaller impact than you’d like.

Why are your open rates low and what can you do to boost them? Our McCauley Marketing Services team has years of experience in email marketing, so we’re offering a few possible reasons why your open rates are low and how you can turn them around.

Your Subject Lines are Missing the Mark

When someone is deciding whether to open your email, they have two pieces of information: the sender and the subject line. If subscribers aren’t opening your emails, it may be because your subject lines aren’t appealing enough to make them want to click.

Find ways to make your subject lines more enticing. Tell the recipient what they stand to gain by opening the email, whether it’s a special discount, new content, or exciting news.

You’re Going Overboard

We all know from experience that too much of a good thing often becomes a bad thing, and your emails are no exception. If you send marketing emails too often, recipients start to get tired of them. If a subscriber is ignoring your emails, they’re one small step from unsubscribing. When you have high rates of people unsubscribing, it can hurt your emails’ deliverability and it can even lead to penalties or blockages from your email marketing tool.

Do a bit of testing to find the ideal email frequency for your audience. It varies among different audiences and industries so there’s no golden rule per se, but it’s generally best to only send emails once per month or once every two weeks – unless, of course, you truly have a new and exciting announcement to make.

You Don’t Understand Your Audience

In some cases, people subscribe to a mailing list expecting something specific, like special offers or exclusive content. If they keep opening your emails and being disappointed, they’ll eventually stop opening your emails and they may unsubscribe altogether.

If this is happening, you need to get a better understanding of what your audience wants and start delivering it if possible. You could take a survey asking recipients what they’d like to see in their inboxes, for example. Or, you could segment your mailing list, such as by separating those who regularly open from those who don’t, and try different subject lines and ideas for different segments to see what works best for each group.

Your Emails are Going to Spam Folders

If you have low open rates, the worst-case scenario is that recipients aren’t seeing your emails because the emails are landing in their spam folders. This is a problem because the more often a recipient’s inbox flags your email as spam, the more likely other subscribers’ inboxes are to do the same.

There are a lot of ways email platforms try to detect spam. They look for specific words, they scan your account’s history of having emails marked as spam, and so on. If you’re using a mass emailing system like MailChimp, iContact, or Constant Contact, most of these types of platforms have spam checkers you can run to look for potential red flags. Be sure to run a spam check and fix any issues that are flagged before you send each email.

Making Your Email Marketing More Productive

No matter how successful your email marketing and other digital marketing endeavors are, they can always be improved. Our team at McCauley Marketing Services specializes in designing data-focused strategies that deliver real results. If you’d like to get more from your marketing strategy, call McCauley Marketing Services today. Follow us as well on Facebook and Instagram for more marketing tips.