What factors are distracting your readers from your Email Campaigns’ messages?
It’s a fact of life – the average person is exposed to over 500 new marketing messages every week! Realizing what factors may be distracting you readers while they are receiving and reading your email messages may make the difference between successful marketing and failure. The good news is that a poor response rate may have nothing to do with your email's content, wording or design.
What is "it"?
Public speaking for impact.
It takes practice, as you talk; you slowly learn to sense your listener's reactions, adjusting your words and delivery on the fly. Professional public speakers develop an intuitive sensitivity to people’s reactions and adjust their tone and message accordingly on the fly.
But email communication is a one way street…
Today email is used by 70% of the American public and 94% of American consumers (displacing the telephone to a large extent). Conversations have become just words on a screen. The “speaker” is now cut off from his audience’s reactions.
Email campaigners - Must have skills
Email campaigners must anticipate reader's reactions at the outset, and edit or rewrite their messages entirely if they miss the mark. Research proves that the emails that achieve the highest success rates, insofar as they convince readers to perform the action desired by the sender, are those that focus on the reader's interests and needs - Emails featuring quality content and offers that readers would not receive otherwise. Useful emails create a good reputation for the sender, and increase the likelihood that future emails will be read, as opposed to being deleted... unread.
What factors are distracting your readers from your Email Campaigns’ messages?
Look at this list of common distractions that compete for a reader's attention. Each adds a new level of complication to the split-mind state - the hovering awareness of surrounding factors. After browsing this list you will quickly realize that it is a small wonder indeed that readers would rather delete minor emails than deal with them.
Email based activities
- Weighing the sender's reputation vs. relevance of the subject line
- Deleting emails of low value
- Flagging emails as spam
- Reading to extract important details
- Entering dates & information in calendar/project programs
- Replying to emails as part of work
- Replying to personal emails
- Forwarding emails to share information
- Forwarding emails to delegate responsibility (first requires assessing the job & who has the best skill set)
- Weighing importance/relevance/priority of new emails that arrive while still working on other tasks
Other work distractions
- Arrival of instant messages
- Taking phone calls related to work
- Taking personal calls from family & friends
- Internet research for work (often ends up in 20 minutes of surfing around)
- Trying to look busy or get noticed by the boss or supervisor
- Nervous reaction to presence of boss or supervisor
- Overly-chatty boss or supervisor
- Split attention trying to hear conversations about office issues
- Useful co-worker interaction & consultations
- Distracting co-worker visits
- Co-worker's cell phone rings and conversations
- Co-worker's loud office conversations
- Intimidation from prying co-workers
- Planning how to thwart co-workder sabotage (paranoid anyone?)
- Prepping for office meetings
- Office meetings
- Acting on information from office meetings
Environmental distractions
- Surfing the web to catch up on daily news
- Big news day distractions (Academy Awards, Olympics, open of a big movie blockbuster)
- Big news day worries (earthquakes, storms, wildfires)
- iTunes, your tunes, any tunes (who can think straight with music, really?)
- Online shopping at work
- Computer problems & connectivity issues
- Workspaces that are too cramped, distracting, hot/stuffy, cold/drafty
- Bad chairs, bad lighting, bad attitude
- Time of day (emails read right before lunch or quittin' time won't get full attention)
- Instant messages from friends about lunch, shopping, dinner
- Setting up lunch dates, dinner dates, dating in general
- Work slow down before lunch, eating lunch, ramping up after lunch
- "Start of the week" slump, midweek slump, "here comes Friday" wind-down
- Office parties and celebrations.
The better you email campaign the higher its chance of beating the odds
Regrettably, you can't "own" your readers, not for a moment, and certainly not forever. Even readers who subscribed to your email list may soon unsubscribe if your emails don't meet their expectations.
Don't get discouraged, get inspired!
Add just a bit more thought and effort to the next email you send and lean back to reap the benefits, your readers will notice the difference, and you will notice the results where it counts – on the bottom line of whatever product or project you are promoting at the moment.
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