There’s plenty of evidence that email marketing is highly effective. For every dollar you invest, you can expect a return of between $36 (according to Litmus) and $44 (according to Campaign Monitor). Even if your email marketing isn’t brilliant, you should still be able to get a positive ROI.

But maybe your email marketing isn’t working at all?

How do you fix that? There are two places to start – the quality of your database, and the quality of your email.

How good is your email database?

The better quality your database is, the more likely you are to have success with email marketing.

Notice I said quality, not quantity.

In so many cases, I’ve seen a small, targeted, up-to-date database outperform a big messy one.

So, what damages the quality of your database? There are a few things to consider:

1. Email decay

‘Email decay’ is the industry term for email addresses dropping out of use. If you’re emailing business contact, this could be because someone leaves the company. Or maybe the business is acquired, or changes its name. For consumer lists, people switch providers, or simply stop using an email. Even free emails are eventually deleted if no one ever checks them.

The rate of email decay is between 20% and 30% of emails every year. That’s between 2% and 3% every month.

If you’re emailing regularly, this isn’t much of a problem. Your email platform is set up to handle email decay. When you send to a non-existent email, the platform receives a ‘hard bounce’ in return. The email is removed from your list automatically.

If you don’t email regularly, you may have problems. Most marketers send email at least once a month, so the email platforms expect a hard bounce rate of up to 2%. Anything higher than that gets flagged. You may get a warning, or you may even find your account is suspended. A bounce rate of 5% or more is a very big, very red flag!

What if you start email marketing for the very first time? You may have email addresses you have collected over many years. Even if you have explicit permission to use every single email on that list, chances are many of them are no longer in use. Even worse, your email platform has no longstanding relationship with you, so there’s no reason to trust you. Your account is very likely to be suspended.

Fixing issues with email decay

Start with the basics:

• Don’t use old, or unvalidated lists.
• Don’t use email addresses which you have not emailed at all in the last two years.

You may also want to consider an email cleaning service before you email. Some of the most popular are listed in the graphic below, or there’s a longer list here.

But a word of warning – no email cleaning service will completely clean your list. Even if you use one, you will still get some hard bounces. So the advice to avoid emails more than two years old still holds!

2. List cleaning

Some people on your list will open every email you send. Others will open some of your emails. And yet others won’t open any.

You need to unsubscribe those people who aren’t opening any emails at all. They are one of the reasons your email marketing isn’t working.

It’s tempting to keep emailing them. To hope that eventually, something will change and they might read your mail and click and become customers. But they won’t. Instead:

• Your emails are probably going to their junk folder (or gmail promotions tab, or whatever) already. They’re never going to see them.
• Emailing these people who never even see your emails may mean higher costs for you.
• Email service providers (Gmail, Outlook, Apple email and so on) can see that your emails are going to junk. They take that into account when delivering your emails to all their customers. So they’re more likely to put your emails into junk (or spam, or promotions, or whatever) more quickly. You get fewer chances to engage new subscribers. And you need more engagement from current subscribers to keep them active.

How do you fix this? It’s simple. Clean out unengaged subscribers.

Here’s an example of the email I send when subscribers have been inactive for a while. (Ideally, send it every 3 months – or even monthly if you have a very large list.)

3. Poor compliance with the Spam Act

I’ve written about the Spam Act in detail before, so I’ll be brief.

The most common issue I see with Spam Act compliance is people assuming they have consent when they don’t. The issue is ‘inferred consent’.

Do you have inferred consent if:

• someone is your client
• someone enquires about your services on your website
• you meet someone at a networking function and they give you their business card, or connect on LinkedIn

ACMA, which oversees compliance with the Spam Act, doesn’t think any of those necessarily give you inferred consent.

Most human beings won’t object if you email them after they enquire or buy from you – as long as you let them unsubscribe! But most human beings don’t like email after the last scenario. (There are ways to do this without annoying people, but they take more work than simply collecting business cards.)

But the overarching issue is, email providers have a very clear view of your unsubscribe rates, and of spam complaints against you.They use that to decide whether your emails reach the main inbox or not.

It all comes down to treating people with respect.

And – here’s a simple piece of advice – get express conest wherever possible.

• Mention on forms that you’re going to add people to a mailing list
• Mention it in the first email you send them. Reassure them that they can unsubscribe if they want to, but invite them to stick around. (And give them reasons to.)

Keeping spam and abuse complaints to a minimum helps more of your emails reach the main inbox!

How good is your email content?

The average inbox is a busy place. Your email has to fight for attention.

This is where we copywriters come into our own. We write content which gets and keeps attention. It’s entertaining, educational or helpful. Sometimes all three at once.

We also know about ‘hooks’ and how important they are to get attention in the first place. And we know what people pay most attention to.

1. Your subject line matters

Your subject line is the first thing people see in their inbox. They can scroll by, or they can open up your email and read. And as David Ogilvy famously said, ‘On the average, five times as many read the headline and read the body copy.‘ So spend some time on your subject line.

Here’s one I wrote:

2. Use preview text

Preview text is like a second subject line. It usually shows up in the user’s email inbox before they open the email. That means it’s a second chance to grab attention.

Here’s an example. You can see:

• the sender name
• the email subject line in bold on the right
• the preview text following on from the subject line (not bolded)

In one case (Wendy Weiss) there isn’t any preview text. In this case, Gmail shows the start of the email content, which isn’t that interesting either. By contrast, Crikey offers a tantalising subject line (Zelenskyy shows Albo how what is done???), follwed by a completely different invitation – to meet their own new editor.

The preview text gives you two bites at the cherry!

Or you can use it the way this client does:

The main subject line simply says that this is an update. Radincon have relationships and reputation in their target market, so this works, especially when combined with a preview text which raises curiosity.

3. Don’t forget the PS

Check out the emails you’ve received from savvy marketers. I bet a huge percentage of them have a PS (postscript) at the end.

What’s going on? How come all these supersmart marketers forget something till the very last minute?

They don’t, of course. They simply know that the PS is one of the most read parts of any email. (Or sales letter, for that matter.)

The subject line and the preview text get people to open your email. Once they open it, they scan. The very top and the very bottom get the most attention. And a PS stands out visually, so it gets even more attention.

That’s why marketers not only include a PS, they also care about it. It usually covers the most important part of the email. It usually includes a call to action, with a link to click on. Here’s one of mine as an example. (And yes, the call-to-action was simply to read a blog, not to buy or enquire. That’s because my newsletter is meant to be helpful rather than hard-sell. There was no pitch for my services at all in this email, just some tips!)

4. The overall content

Content needs to be valuable to people in some way. It may be helpful with a specific issue. It may be educational. It may simply be entertaining. Ideally, it’s a mix of all of those, with some kind of sales message for you tucked in there too.

If you can’t create that regularly, maybe you need help? At NoBull Marketing, we can either write the entire thing for you, or work on brainstorming some ideas for relevant content.

Summing up

After all that, do you have some ideas why your email marketing isn’t working? And how you can fix it?

If you do, you can try fixing the issue yourself. Or if you’d rather, reach out and we can help you walk through things.

If you still don’t know what’s making your email marketing ineffective, I’d love to have a chat. Review your database and your emails, all the time considering what you offer. I may be able to offer insights you haven’t got yourself.

PS: One final tip…

(Yes, I know, cheeky sub-heading! 🙂)

Make it easy to reply!

Email is about communication and interaction. You’re reaching out inviting people to connect, enquire, or buy. Make it easy for them.

• Send your emails from a human, not a company. Bridget Holland, not NoBull Marketing. Or Bridget at NoBullMarketing. But send from a person, not a system. That’s how you build relationships.
• Send from an address people can reply to.
  It doesn’t have to be your main email address. Mine is, but I don’t have 10,000 subscribers, so I don’t get 2,000 autoreplies. It does have to be an email address which recipients can reply to. And it has to be an email address which someone reviews, to check for genuine responses in amongst the autoreplies.

After all, there is zero point in creating and sending amazing emails if the people who get them can’t respond!