Quick poll, who has received between 10-50 marketing emails – probably more – and only engaged with a handful today? Me too.

If you’re the one doing the sending, how does it feel to know your carefully crafted content has gone straight into someone’s junk or delete folder? Shit, right?

So, what are you doing with this information? If you’re still sending emails regardless, that’s your first mistake. What you need to know is that there could be all manner of reasons why your digital comms are dying a death. But, if you’re not analysing your data, how will you know?

You’ve got an embarrassingly low open rate

I’ve previously said this is a marketer’s ‘vanity metric’, but it could quickly identify if you should be worried about your email send. There’s a huge issue if you focus solely on this measurement though because up to 30% of opens are typically modelled by an email marketing platform and ultimately come from a bot. Not giving you the full picture, is it?

What engagement?

Are people getting in touch about your product or service, downloading a guide or attending a webinar following your comms? If they’re not, use this information wisely. But, if you really want to know what’s floating your recipient’s boat, tap into lead scoring. Only then will you know exactly how a user has interacted with your emails and website. You can then feed the hottest leads into your sales team to convert.

It’s a bot traffic free-for-all

The bad news is most email marketing tools don’t have the capability to battle the bots altogether, and you’re left with skewed stats. If you haven’t got a marketing automation platform with web tracking activity built in – which analyses when a human has engaged with your content or whether a bot has waded in – then get researching for a new provider now.

The above is only a snapshot of reasons why your latest campaign has died on stage. So, how do you turn this around?

1.       Data, data, data

If you’re not always checking this and reacting, what’s the point? Relying on simply sending more emails to cold prospects and hoping one user will pick it up is a risky strategy that not only damages your brand loyalty, but server reputation too.

Know your detail inside out and respond proactively, in real-time, to ensure every individual’s of-the-moment interests are being catered for with hyper-personalised comms.

2.       Understand your bounce info

When a contact is having none of your email, that’s giving you a tonne of insight for you to act on. If it’s a soft bounce – for example your contact has moved to another job – update this email as soon as possible (or get marketing automation to automatically do it for you). Aim for no more than 1% hard bounces in your email delivery too, and check your CRM isn’t reactivating these addresses.

3.       Segmented your audience and be relevant

Let’s keep this short as every marketer should understand segmentation and relevance by now. There are different ways to group your contacts in terms of how engaged they are. One example is by varying your delivery speeds to drill down into specific, granular audiences so you can send them more ultra-personalised, relevant digital comms.

4.       And finally…

Don’t deliver over-complex emails with a confused design that half your contacts can’t be arsed to jump through hoops in order to download your latest guide or read a blog. Focus on your artwork and keep it simple.

And, if you’ve got a super engaged recipient, send comms at a frequency they’re happy with and enjoy a high cadence. If you’re pestering someone who doesn’t care about what you do or who you are, you’re heading into spam territory – know the difference.