Email fatigue is a real thing, especially with the continuing pandemic.
Email marketing is far from dead, but it is getting harder and harder to get your branded emails opened and clicked.
What is Email Fatigue?
As the name suggests, email fatigue is when a person doesn’t want to read emails and feels more willing to delete, unsubscribe or send emails to spam.
Email fatigue is something just about anyone feels from time to time.
Gone are the days when people would diligently click each and every unread email in their inbox to read what is inside.
Gone are the days when people would actually be looking forward to receiving a new email.
These days a full inbox is nothing new or exciting. And it has been getting worse.
Back in 2017, two thirds of Americans felt overwhelmed by the number of email messages they received on a daily basis.
And who can blame them?
Same year, 85% of emails were found useless.
In 2020 email fatigue grew exponentially and for an obvious reason: Most consumers were locked at home and all the brands started relying on email marketing as the prime (and often the only) way to keep in touch with them.
Obviously, we were all overwhelmed in 2020 and it isn’t much easier in 2021.
Yet, email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing tactics.
Customers who buy products after clicking links in an email tend to spend almost 140% more than an average customer. As many as 50% of marketers claim that email marketing is more effective than social media.
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Here’s how you can overcome email fatigue and boost your email marketing strategy:
1. Send a Welcome Email
This one may be a no-brainer but lots of brands still fail to do that. Welcome emails still work, mostly thanks to the factor of recency. Your customers have just interacted with your brand, so they will likely engage with and locate your email right away.
Welcome emails are highly effective: studies claim that welcome emails bring 320% more revenue than any other promotional emails.
2. Take Advantage of Marketing Personalization
It is astounding how many promotional emails I still receive that don’t even include my first name.
Yet, even the most basic personalization helps. Greet your customers with their name and you’ll find them much more willing to give your message a try.
Go a step further and personalize your email by including products they viewed or added to a shopping cart, and you will see even better results.
Case studies show that personalized campaigns bring almost twice as many opens and clicks as non-segmented ones.
Of course, this depends on how well personalization is done, so that per cent may even be higher. How well you do personalization obviously depends on your marketing partner or platform.
With Wix’s email marketing services you can personalized your emails in a meaningful way, for example, by using your customer’s name or previously purchased products:
3. Treat Emails as Any Content Campaign
Any email marketing blueprint will recommend you sending great emails so that your subscribers would look forward to your next one.
Obviously, it is easier said than done.
However it may doable if you change your mindset: Treat each campaign as any content marketing asset out there. Talk to your customers’ needs, pains and interests. Research what triggers their interactions and find content ideas that would spur their curiosity.
Asking a good question in an email subject and then answering it in your email is one of the most effective ways to generate more email opens. I often turn to Text Optimizer’s question research section to pick up a good question to discuss in my upcoming email marketing campaign:
Text Optimizer uses semantic research to identify angles that customers expect to read, so it is a good tool for both topic and audience research.
4. Make Use of Video Content (But Don’t Overuse)
Another marketing trick that tends to work in content marketing is using video content. Like any form of visual content, videos combine the best features of two worlds: It makes information easier to process while being entertaining.
Videos work wonders when placed on landing pages, and they do help emails to get noticed.
It is a well-known trick that including in an email subject tends to drive more opens and reads. Obviously, you cannot overuse this tactic but sending a happy birthday video email or sharing an occasional video tutorial may do wonders to your open rate.
5. Set up Meaningful Email Triggers
Quite obviously, email fatigue is triggered by too many emails. So do your best to avoid hitting your subscribers’ limits.
It is a fine line between not letting your customers forget about you and being too aggressive with reminding them of your brand.
Normally, the following a routine helps build recognizability without irritating:
- A promotional email once a month
- A special occasion email (like “Happy birthday” message which was mentioned above)
- Automatic email reminding customers of an abandoned cart or a failed payment.
Just about any email automation software will help you set these up pretty easily. Just don’t overdo!
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6. Be Really Empathic and Genuine
While empathy has always been a good idea (not unique for marketing), these days it is more of a necessity than a recommendation.
And don’t try to fake it. During these trying times, your customers are more sensitive than ever. They will smell fakeness right away!
Maxwell Hertan of Megaphone Marketing put it best:
Depending on your business it also might be 100% necessary to address the elephant in the room. COVID-19 is on the minds of all of us, it’s okay to touch on the subject just don’t exploit the situation!
7. Keep an Eye on Your Landing Page Performance
It would be quite disappointing if after all that strategic planning you lose a subscriber to a broken link or a slow landing page. These days consumers have no patience to wait for a page to load. They are also less forgiving when it comes to interrupted browsing due to broken links or images.
With that in mind, make sure to click all the links in your email to ensure they work. Or better yet, check that link on a mobile device (which is where most emails are read and most emailed links are clicked).
And if you are inclined to be really thorough, run a quick on-page analysis to make sure there are no broken links or images on that page, as well as no performance issues. Site Checker gives you an option to run quick on-page audits for free and see if there’s anything wrong with the page:
8. Keep Looking at Your Stats
Most email marketing solutions include analytics in some sort or another. More often than not, you will see which campaign was a success in terms of clicks and opens and which one appeared to get trapped by spam filters. After a few days of sending an email blast, check out those numbers to get some actionable insights for your next campaign.
Your on-site analytics will be a great help here as well. You will be able to see which campaign drove the most conversions and which one failed to deliver any tangible results.
Finteza is one analytics solution that delivers most actionable insights helping you understand what has worked and how well any traffic source performed in terms of sending those site visitors down your sales funnel:
Conclusion
Email marketing may be much more challenging than what it was a decade ago but just about any marketing tactic has been going through transformation over the years, and more so most recently.
It would be weird to expect email marketing to remain the same. But the good news is, marketing software has been evolving as well letting you keep up with change and get ahead of your competition. The key is to find a smart marketing solution, so hopefully the above recommendations will help!
