Why Most Email Newsletters Fail (And How To Fix Yours In 3 Steps)
Are you tired of sending newsletter after newsletter only to have it be ignored or receive low click-through rates?
As a marketing tool, your newsletter needs to deliver a clear and direct message to your reader that demonstrates the value your brand has to offer them.
Unfortunately, most newsletters fail to do this.
In this post, we discuss reasons why your newsletter may not be performing as well as you’d like it to and share tips on how to fix it.
Why most email newsletters fail
No clear goal
When you write an email, do you know what you want to come from it?
Do you want your reader to visit your new post? Do you want them to engage with your brand? Are you trying to get them to make a purchase?
Knowing what goal you want to accomplish with your email before you start writing will help you write a more effective message.
If you simply write up a quick draft whenever you have a new post to promote or use the same template over and over again, you may not be putting enough thought and consideration into each email.
Inconsistent publishing schedule
Do you publish on your blog or social media accounts inconsistently? Do you only publish a newsletter whenever you have a new post to promote, so your newsletter shares that inconsistency?
Consumers like consistency. They like knowing when they can consume something. When a new trailer drops for something, what they’re most eager to see is its release date.
If you’re struggling to get anything going for your brand, try adding a little consistency to your posting schedule.
Choose a specific day of the week or days of the week to send emails, and only send emails on those days.
Make sure your email content is consistent as well.
Don’t publish a promotion email in the first four timeslots then fill the fifth with a long post about something you’re excited about.
It’s okay if you want to use your newsletter as a space for microblogging, but you should work those posts into your overall schedule, not throw them in sporadically every now and then.
Using names in the from field
Some email apps have a hard time filtering spam. Users will find spam in their inboxes and legitimate emails in their spam folder.
This has made it a lot more difficult for consumers to recognize spam, which also leads to them assuming legitimate emails are spam, especially marketing emails.
In Gmail, each email in a user’s inbox has the sender’s name, a subject line, a preheader, and the time/date sent.
If you or someone on your team uses a personal name in the From field instead of the brand name your reader recognizes, you risk having your emails get sent straight to the trash since they may not recognize your name.
Generic subject lines
Consumers receive a lot of marketing emails on a daily basis. Gmail even has a special tab for marketing emails called the Promotions tab.
If you want to stand out among these emails, you need to improve your subject lines and preheader text.
Subject lines are the bold text in your inbox. Preheader text is the normal text to the right of the subject line.
Use your subject line as a headline and your preheader text as a summary or teaser for your email.
There are numerous ways you can optimize your subject line:
- Use numerals when adding numbers to your headline.
- Use all caps to emphasize important words.
- Insert calls to action surrounded by brackets, such as [Join Now LIVE], especially for time-sensitive emails.
- Use power words and phrases that trigger an emotion in your reader, emotions such as FOMO, inspiration and desire.
- Ask questions.
- End with a cliffhanger your reader can only complete by opening your email.
Poor microcopy
Optimize other parts of your emails as well, including your opening line, call to action text (button text) and the text leading up to your CTA.
Your opening line is most important. Try to make it more exciting so your readers are hooked the second they open your email.
Open with a story, humor, a fact your reader would find interesting or a personal struggle you know your reader is going through.
Related reading: Email Microcopy: The Tiny Words That Make A Big Impact
No value proposition
One of the worst mistakes marketers make is writing marketing messages that focus on the brand themselves and not the customer.
If you want your reader to care about your emails and anything your brand has to promote, you need to offer something of value to them.
You need a value proposition.
So, while you’re asking yourself what goal you want to accomplish with an email, also ask what value it offers to your reader. How will it improve their lives?
If you can’t answer this question, your content may be self-serving, which is something a lot of creators need to spend less time doing.
Make sure your subscriber can get something out of every email you promote.
You don’t need to put an entire post into your email, but you should put at least one whole element into it. This could be a fact, a mini guide from the larger guide you’re promoting, a retelling of something that happens in the video you’re promoting, a discount code for a product, etc.
Don’t just simply say “check out my latest post” and insert a link to it. Give your reader a reason to be eager to open every email you send.
No personalization
Another mistake marketers make is assuming everyone in their target audience is the same and is interested in the same topics and products.
The truth is your target audience is complex no matter how specific you get with your niche.
It’s filled with unique individuals and sub groups that have their own interests.
If you don’t cater to those individual interests in your email copy, you’ll have a hard time convincing your reader you have anything of value to offer them.
While there are plenty of stats that support the importance of personalization, it’s really just a logical thing to do.
Inconsistent tone
Do you apply humor to some emails but keep things stiff and professional in others?
Consumers are used to the generic marketing tones brands having been using for decades. Show them you’re different by using a friendlier tone that’s more casual.
But whatever kind of tone you choose, make sure you use it in every email you send so that your overall marketing tone is consistent.
No calls to action
A call to action (CTA) is a specific action you want your reader to take, such as visiting a specific page, signing up for something or purchasing a specific product.
They usually take the form of buttons but can take the form of plain-text links as well.
These actions represent the goals you should have for your emails.
Almost every email you send should have a call to action, especially emails that promote something.
Generally, it’s best to use buttons where possible but there will be occasions where plain-text links make sense.
Hard sales pitches
If almost every email you send pitches a product to your consumer, you may be causing them to have buyer fatigue.
Pull back on the hard sales pitches by spending more of your effort creating valuable content for your customers instead.
Too many emails
If most of your emails are being ignored, consider the possibility that you’re simply sending too many.
Unless you only send no more than two emails a week, try cutting back on your publishing schedule.
Bad design
Do you use fully-designed HTML templates or plain-text emails?
Either is fine, but if you use fully-designed email templates or a drag-and-drop email builder, you may be burying your copy behind designs that are much too loud.
Plain-text emails are known to perform well, but there is such a thing as using too much plain text, such as using plain-text links in place of CTA buttons.
You’ll need to find the best balance between the two. A balance that works for your business and your audience.
How to fix your newsletter
1. Develop an email marketing strategy
Work on your email marketing strategy by choosing a publishing schedule for emails, a tone to use and content categories.
Content categories can include content promotion, product promotion, micro blog posts, updates, announcements and digest emails.
Choose a strategy to use for each.
Get more familiar with email campaigns as well. These are emails you send that have clear and defined goals.
2. Segment your audience
Use your email marketing app’s segmentation features to segment your list in a variety of different ways.
Create separate segments for customers and non-customers as well as one segment for each product you offer.
If you offer a lot of products, use product categories instead.
Create segments for the primary topics in your niche as well.
You can also create segments for different stages in your niche, such as beginner, intermediate and expert.
3. Offer something of value in your email
I want to stress this point one last time.
If you want your readers to care about your emails, you need to think of email marketing as its own platform and not just as a platform that’s designed to promote things from other channels.
Make sure every email you publish offers some sort of value to your reader even if they don’t click your call to action.
4. Analyze and A/B test everything
Hopefully, your email marketing app offers A/B testing, also known as split testing.
This allows you to send two versions of the same email to your list with half your list receiving one version and the other half receiving the other.
Use it to test different subject lines, preheader text, opening lines, email copy and calls to action.
You should also use your email marketing app’s analytics to optimize your strategy.
If the tool you use doesn’t have these features built-in, you may want to consider switching to MailerLite. It has some excellent A/B testing functionality.
Final thoughts
If your email newsletter isn’t delivering the results you’d hoped for, don’t give up yet.
Use the points we covered above to tighten up your newsletter and make it as good as it possibly can be.
When you get it right, your newsletter can be an extremely useful asset for your business. You can use it to drive traffic to content and sell products directly.
Or it could even be the focal point of your entire business. That’s quite common for content creators, bloggers, and entrepreneurs.
So, take a step back to evaluate the state of your newsletter. Identify any weak areas, fix them and wait for those fixes to take hold.