3 reasons your emails suck

1. You’re doing too much

When your email doesn’t have one specific and defined goal, the entire campaign suffers. When emails have multiple CTAs, your user ends up spending more time reading through what you want them to do than they do actually doing it.

How many times have you personally clicked on more than one link in an email? Even if you’re interested in more than one aspect, chances are you click on one link and navigate to the other on your own.

Set a defined goal, and stick to it. By adding more than one CTA to your email, you’re cannibalizing your own content. Neither CTA will perform well, and some users won’t bother to click at all. Which brings me to my next point.

2. You’re saying too much

People have limited attention spans. And in the digital world, you’re competing with more content than you can ever keep up with, so stop wasting everyone’s time.

Who even reads emails anymore? If you’re even able to get your contacts to open your emails, they aren’t going to take the time to read everything you write. They’ll take a few seconds to scan your email, and then they’ll move on to the next task on their never-ending to-do list. Get to the point.

Be a human. Even if you’re emailing 100,000 people, even if it’s automatic, it’s still coming from you. Your readers and users are human, and they deserve to have their time respected.

3. You’re not paying attention

It’s easy to look at industry averages when it comes to opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. But to succeed and really understand your users, you need to go beyond that. Analyze your campaigns across all time. Look to see what topics and terms encourage your users to engage with you.

By diving into your content and finding themes, you’re able to give your users what they want, and anticipate the needs of new users before they even know they have them.

At the end of the day, put yourself in your reader’s shoes -- beyond sending yourself a live test. Ask yourself if this is an email you would like to receive. Would you spend the time to read it, or are you saying too much? Would you click on your own links, or are you asking too much? Is this email something that matters?

Pay more attention to your user, because your emails don’t have to suck.