Why your email campaigns aren't working

We’re in the business of helping our clients succeed when it comes to email marketing. We do this through our exceptional platform and guided support. What happens when your email marketing campaigns don’t seem to be helping you increase your bottom line? Here are some common reasons why your campaigns might not be performing as well as you’d like.

Not knowing your audience well enough

It’s best practice when starting your business to do market research about your ideal audience (also known as your target audience). Over time your business will grow and this might affect your core target market. Having a good understanding about your core audience can help you craft better messages. Try to gather more demographic information about your audience such as gender, income, interests, level of education, etc. The more information you can gather about your subscribers, the better as you’ll be able to craft your content to appeal to them.

Bad design

Back in the day, email design wasn’t as important as it is now. With advancements across email clients and more clients harnessing the power of email marketing competition is tough. Badly designed emails are no longer acceptable. With our drag and drop editor, you can easily design a beautiful template in no time. If you don’t feel you have a keen eye for design, you can make use of our free built-in templates to help you get started.

No value to your content

Content can be a powerful tool when it comes to assisting the conversion process. Good content can create a reason for people to subscribe to your lists and add perceived value to your business’s products and services.

Start thinking about what you send and what value you can add to a client’s overall experience through your email campaigns. Are there any opportunities for you to educate clients on how certain products work or are beneficial to them? Do you have a unique delivery service or support department that you can tell them more about? Try to include content that might add more value to your subscribers other than just pushing promotional offers to them.

You aren’t consistent

If you are sporadically emailing your customers, you can’t expect to receive great results. Not creating a consistent email marketing plan or schedule can mean that subscribers:

• Forget that they subscribed to your list
• Don’t get familiar with you

Consistency is also key in email marketing when it comes to the way your email is presented. Create a template that you can use that you can keep consistent and easily update as needed. It breeds familiarity and helps your subscribers recognise emails from you. This rings true for all other brand emails - fonts, logo placement image style, etc.

More isn’t always more (if you know what we mean)

Following on the previous reason that might affect your email campaigns - sending too many emails can also negatively impact your performance. Too many emails can result in people unsubscribing as it can become invasive or annoying. The rule of thumb here - only send emails to your subscribers when you have something to say. Your emails should add value to their lives and offer them information on how to engage with your business.

Your subject lines aren’t catchy

We talk about subject lines often. We even have a dedicated category on our blog section for it! Your subject line is the first port of call to enable you to run successful campaigns as it is the first thing your subscriber will see. A subject line needs to encourage or entice your subscriber to actually open your email and learn more. If you’re struggling with subject lines read our article how to create a winning subject line.

You can also run extensive subject line tests to see what your subscribers respond to more. This way you’ll use your own audience to help improve and optimise.

Your database is outdated

Sending campaigns to an outdated database can affect your campaign performance. When you send to an outdated database you’ll see a high number of bounces as people might not be using the same email address. If your database is outdated it means you are less likely to actually reach your subscriber’s inbox. This leads to a decrease in the return on investment you’ll see from email marketing.

Don’t despair if you aren’t seeing an immediate return. The great thing about email marketing is that you can change tactics to improve whenever you need and all the reasons your emails might not be working can be remedied.