It happens to the best of us. You develop a great email campaign and send it out, and as you get your results, you see that open rates were decent but the click-through was disappointing. Your emails should be encouraging action, so when you don’t see any action you want to find out what went wrong – and fast – so you can improve on the next one.

Here are four reasons your emails might be getting tossed after opening.

 

It wasn’t working on mobile.
So many people today are checking their email on a mobile device rather than a desktop computer, and not optimizing your emails to suit this standard will kill your email engagement rates. If the copy is unreadable and broken in strange places, people will move on. The copy on the email needs to be big enough to read without a problem and any text links need to be easy to tap on a phone. If your user can’t figure out how to tap a link that’s too small, or the copy has broken up, the email is a goner.

 

It wasn’t timely.
You can design a beautiful campaign with flashy colors and an eye-catching subject line all you want, but if it doesn’t hit people at the right time, it won’t perform. For example, we know the holidays can be an exciting time, but do people really want to be opening an email about Christmas events in September? It seems like holiday preparation starts earlier and earlier each year, but you need to find the middle ground and consider the timeliness of the campaign before you hit send.

 

The Call to Action got lost.
You want your subscribers to click! That’s the point of email marketing, right? But you need to make it clear exactly what you want them to click and act on. Don’t complicate your message with too many choices; make it clear and use specific copy exactly what action you want them to take. If your users are anything like me, they can be overwhelmed with too many choices and it will ultimately lead to indecision and loss of sale.

 

You’re sending too much.
Finding the balance of sending frequency is difficult and can take time to perfect, but it’s crucial to your business. If you send too much, having something that’s “limited time” doesn’t seem so exclusive if you’re sending it every day. If you send too little, your audience may lose interest in you, or forget about you completely. Think about your own subscriptions and what you like to receive and what you don’t – and what brands you think are emailing you too much – and see if you can learn from them and use it for your own business. Keep track of your analytics and fine-tune your frequency based on your audience responses and you’ll be able to find your footing.