Statistically speaking, the Email Inbox is where you are most visible to your Followers.

You can determine this by process of elimination for yourself.

Your biggest fans in the world aren’t going to wake up tomorrow and reload and refresh the front page of your website for no good reason.

Your followers *are* going to go onto Social Media, but will the almighty algorithms show them your posts? Not likely.

So, what’s left? The Inbox of course – and the average person checks their inbox multiple times per day on their mobile device. So visibility is ultra high compared to all other online platforms.

That being said, the volume, pace, and noise of the inbox is reaching new heights, so you may find that even your loyal followers are not engaging your emails.

What’s up with that?

Here are some factors that you should examine carefully to make sure you are setting your email marketing up for success:

Subject Line

Most of your email list members are looking at their inbox on their mobile device, and they are doing it in short bursts, scanning across the surface of things to see what gets their attention.

“Newsletter, February 2018” is not a good subject line. It’s predictable and it communicates an idea of a long email, which equals easy to pass on. (Unless of course you have a newsletter that has a 30, 40, 50% open rate because it’s been a longstanding piece of communication that they all know what to expect and what it should look like)

Length

Your email should be less than two swipes long. If they see that your email is long and arduous, they’re gonna bail. Guess what happens if you do that again? They learn that you are one of the emails they can ignore in the inbox. Then you are left behind.

Gone are the days of long wordy updates. Most readers see that email load and immediately bounce off of it to something else. So shorten it up. It’s actually preferable to break a long email into two messages and send them separately.

For example, a four or five topic newsletter once a month can become a short email burst every other week with only a few topics.

Image Driven

We are digesting the internet in bites and gulps. And what qualifies what we will digest is based on the images. The images are the eye-catching, non-verbal-communicating X-factor to every single thing online.  So don’t depend so heavily on your writing skills as an email marketer – it’s all about the pictures.

We used to engage the internet in the manner that we’d read a book. Biggest text first, then scan for image, then core text.  Now, due to mobile devices and the pace of life, we are using a scanning mode to glance across our device many times a day to see what interests us enough to tap and view.

Be sure to lead with images. For every email, for every social post, think “How can I communicate the most effective part of my message with an image that people can glance at in half a second and be drawn in?”

If you examine and tweak those three areas, you will see an improvement in your Email Open Rate, Click Through Rates, and overall Engagement.

Have any other tips or ideas? Feel free to share in the comments.