Are your emails getting read?

Email marketing is alive and well, in spite of all the doomsayers who say email is dead. Most people use email to communicate, and generally check their email multiple times a day.

We all get tons of emails–notifications, calendar events, special discounts, sales pitches and perhaps a few personal notes too. What makes you open (let alone read) an email. There are a few scenarios:

Known sender: We’ll open something if we know who is sending it (your aunt Karen or Groupon, for example) Of course, spammers have exploited this to their advantage by fabricating the sent address.

Subject line: We’ll open something if it sounds relevant or interesting, like “Special Event to Benefit (name of charity you care about) Next Week).

Ideally, your emails should have both to ENSURE the are opened. If you don’t have one, you have to work on the other. Your mother can send you an email with the subject line “Hi,” but if you are someone the recipient does not know your subject line MUST be descriptive.

I received an email this morning from someone I do not know, which had the subject line “meeting request.” Why should I open that? I don’t know the person sending it and the subject tells me nothing. If this person had been more descriptive and said “(Company name) requesting meeting to discuss (product/service/whatever)” wouldn’t that have made it clear what the email was about?

Think about your readers…do they know you well enough to care about your emails? If not, give them a good reason!

UPDATE: Check out this infographic about email, which provides some good facts/figures including the fact that email continues to GROW.