An essential part of a B2B content marketing strategy is an eNewsletter, whether it is sent weekly, daily, monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly. It’s a great way to stay top-of-mind with current clients, nurture potential clients along the sales funnel, and increase quality traffic to your website.
So what happens when you hit “Send” and no one hits “Open”?
Is it possible that your audience doesn’t like your newsletter? Is it possible that they hate it and delete it the moment they see it in their inbox?
Don’t worry, if you think your clients aren’t fans of your B2B email marketing, we can help you turn it around. Let’s take a look at 5 reasons why clients hate your eNewsletters:
1. It’s Too Promotional or Self-Promotional
Sale! Sale! Sale!
We are the Best! Look at how awesome we are!
Look what we are up to right now!
Do any of these subject lines or topics sound familiar? While promotional emails have their time and place, especially for ecommerce or product-driven businesses, they aren’t effective for lead nurturing, client retention, or driving traffic to your B2B website. In fact, promotional or self-promotional emails can actually turn your audience away.
Quick Fix
Ask yourself how you can offer value to your email audience. What will help them do their jobs better? Streamline processes? Save time? Save money? Allow flexibility? Provide efficiency? Perform a test by sending out an educational email that features a recent blog or ebook that you’ve put together.
2. It’s Spam (Not the Canned Kind)
It’s possible that your email is tripping spam filters and is ending up in the Junk folder. Did you purchase a list of email addresses and start sending them emails without their consent? SPAM! Do you make it hard to unsubscribe from your enewsletter? SPAM! Do you automatically sign up all your clients for your B2B email marketing campaigns? SPAM!
It’s almost easier to accidentally send spam emails than it is to avoid. One of the main reasons your email may be considered spam is your email marketing tool. If it’s not following email marketing best practices, that could cause your emails to be considered spam. Using a reputable, spam-conscious email marketing platform, like MailChimp or Marketo, ensures you can do everything possible to avoid ending up labeled as junk or spam.
Quick Fix
Make sure the only people receiving your email newsletter have opted in using a consent form. You never want to be a burden or annoyance to current or potential clients – make it easy to unsubscribe from your emails. MailChimp has a great guide on How to Avoid Spam Filters that includes other tips for avoiding spam filters and best practices for email marketing.
3. You Send It Too Often
Hi, it’s me.
It’s me again.
Just saying hi.
Hello again.
Sending emails to your audience too often can be flat-out annoying. According to a recent article in CIO, emailing prospects and clients too often is a top reason why they will unsubscribe from your email marketing campaigns.
What is the right frequency for email sends? It varies by the individual. We typically advise our clients to send eNewsletters on a monthly or bi-monthly basis as a start.
Quick Fix
Ask your audience how often they’d like to hear from you. It’s easy to set up a frequency option on your opt-in form or to send a survey that asks how often they’d like to receive emails and what they would like to see in the newsletters.
4. It’s Not Responsive
Did you know that 64% of decision-makers read their emails on mobile devices (SalesForce Blog)?
If your emails don’t display properly on mobile devices, you could be providing a poor user experience for a large chunk of your audience. Your clients and prospects don’t have the time to try to navigate an email that isn’t responsive. (Don’t believe us? Check out All the Responsive Web Design Statistics You Need)
Quick Fix
Any worthwhile email marketing platform has an option to build a responsive email template. Try to open one of your company’s emails on a mobile device to check if it’s responsive. If it doesn’t automatically resize to fit your device, look into creating an email template that is responsive.
5. It’s Too Long
It goes on…
And on…
And on…
And on…without an end in sight.
Many of the best email marketing campaigns are emails that are brief and to the point. Never send an entire blog post in an email. Anyone who opens that email will be overwhelmed and likely won’t have the time to read that entire email.
Quick Fix
Get to the point, quickly. Share a small snippet of your blog or a brief overview of the content piece you are sharing with your audience, then include a link to where they can read more or download the content piece. This has a two-fold benefit: first, your audience gets the info quickly; second, it drives quality traffic to your website.
There you have it! The mystery of why your email isn’t getting opens or click-throughs is solved. Have you recently revamped your B2B email marketing campaigns? What triggered the revamping efforts?
