5 Reasons Why Emails Don't Get Opened

Email marketing has become an essential tool for business ever since the introduction of the Internet, and now even more so with the growth of Inbound Marketing*. It is a form of direct marketing that uses electronic mail as a means of communicating messages to an audience.

As marketers, we’re always seeking new ways to improve the content, design, headlines etc., to get more of our audience’s attention towards our emails. However, some recipients will delete an email before they even open it! Why?

Below are 5 reasons an email may never get opened:

1. Email Subject Line

Firstly, you have to consider the importance of subject lines in conveying your message. You only have one shot at making a great first impression, and the subject line is responsible for this. It serves to provide the audience with some insight as to what the message is about and hopefully spark their interest; it is the deciding factor as to whether your email gets opened.

Subject lines that are too long or too broad will often be ignored. DON’T write in all CAPS or include symbols or strange characters! Not only is this obnoxious, but you’re more likely to end up in a spam filter. Make your subject line relevant to the message and easy to understand what you are offering. Make it simple and clear!

2. Sending at the wrong time

If you have implemented an email campaign, knowing what day of the week and at what time of day is the best time to send an email blast is a key element for email success. Sending on the wrong day or time can negatively affect your email performance. According to a Pivotal Veracity study, early morning email delivery has the lowest open rate. This makes sense since the first time most people check their email is when they arrive at work, and the common habit is to delete anything unimportant in order to reduce clutter before the day starts.

According to MailChimp, more people open emails during the day than at night. You may find that changing the time that you send your emails will change your open rate. More emails are sent during the week than on weekends, with Tuesday and Thursday being the highest volume days.

3. Serving annoying content

Your content must be valuable to your audience by taking on the qualities of being informative, interesting or compelling. Good content makes and supports the value of what you are offering. It should be well organized, easily found, and easy to promote. If you are not able to serve content that is full of information and offering what they are looking for, your email would end up in their trash box. Here are the 8 types of emails you should be using. (Tip: Having good content in your emails will also help you to create an enticing subject line, which as we said earlier, is important as well.)

4. Sending one big image

We know it's enticing to take that gorgeous flyer created by your professional designer for printing, then save it as a JPG file and plug it into your email, but sending one big image is risky. Servers are more likely to filter emails with large images, and our audiences may move on to other things before your image fully loads. Some email programs like Gmail and Outlook block images by default.
Thus, what is the best way to produce an email? Get your HTML designer to slice your gorgeous image and convert it to a HTML version.

5. Landing in spam

There are several things that email filters will search for when reviewing your content for spam. Words and phrases like "Guaranteed", "Free", “Act Now” and "Credit card" are red flags for spam filters. Using numerous special characters and excessive punctuation marks will also flag spam filters.

Use the above tips in conjunction with testing and you may perceive an improvement in your open rates.

* Inbound marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves SEO, Social Media, blog and landing pages to generate sales leads.