Three Reasons Email Marketing Doesn't Work

I met with a prospect a few weeks ago who had tried email marketing and said, “It didn’t work for us.” I asked him what he wanted email marketing to do and he said, “Get us more business.”

It’s a long and winding road from “send-out-email” to “measurable-increase-in-business.” Plotting the route between marketing expenditures and generating revenue has been a challenge for marketing since long before the Internet was a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye.

Online marketing in general and email specifically do represent progress in making that connection but it does still require planning, measuring, testing, re-testing and continuously improving the program to see the benefits.

Here are three reasons your email campaign may not be working:

1. It’s not structured around a specific objective.

While “get  us more business” is a legitimate objective, the prospect I spoke with hadn’t structured his email campaign to actually do that.

With a sales process, there are a number of touches or steps that need to occur before a prospect becomes a customer. A campaign, a series of emails, should be designed to bring people along that process.

For example, if you assume reading the email is the first step, its closing call to action should prompt the reader to take the next step, for example, visiting your website or downloading a white paper to learn more.

2. It doesn’t end with a call to action—or it ends with too many calls to action.

If I finish reading your email, am a little interested, but don’t have a call to action prompting me to further action, I’m moving on to the next item in my inbox.

And if I’m a little interested, but there’s more than one or two choices for my next step—I’m also moving on.

That’s because when people are going through their email, they’re trying to get through it quickly. All those other messages still clogging up their box are weighing on them. They want to keep moving toward eliminating those—not too mention all the other tasks on their ‘to-do’ lists.

When they’ve finished scanning your email, if they’re faced with three or four choices for their next step, they’re struck with decision paralysis and it’s much easier to exit and move on.

The natural inclination is to provide plenty of options: “Visit our website” or “schedule a demo” or “download our white paper” or “contact us.”  Common sense says, let the reader decide.

In fact, given all those choices, the reader will choose none. (Chip and Dan Heath discussed studies that reveal the way multiple choices create decision paralysis in their book, Switch.)

3. Results don’t inform subsequent campaigns

Email is a great way to learn what your prospects are interested in. Every time they click on something, they’re telling you. Use the analytics offered by your email service provider to determine what topics interest them. See what calls to action get the most clicks. Track prospects’ progress through your sales funnel and see what role your online marketing played. Take all that information back to your email campaign and tweak accordingly.