The Cost of Being Ignored
The first time I created a real email campaign, I was convinced I’d done everything right. I spent hours perfecting the strategy, editing the words, and finding the right subject line. It was going to take me to the next level.
Until it didn’t.
I remember sitting at my computer, staring at the screen and seeing an open rate of three percent. I blinked. That can’t be right. Three percent? This was heartbreaking, embarrassing. I was someone who succeeded. I immediately shut down the computer—if I didn’t look at the failure, it didn’t happen.
My mind began spiraling with all the self-deprecating thoughts we’ve all experienced. What I wrote wasn’t good enough. I just wasn’t good at marketing. I’d probably gone as far as I could go. At one point, I’d even considered giving up the idea entirely and trying to come up with a different way to earn money. That thought stopped me in my tracks. A three percent open rate is not a reason to give up on everything.
With time and a bit of distance, I began to understand that successful email campaigns weren’t about talent. No, they’re about the psychology of attention. What makes a person choose to open your message instead of the twenty others in their inbox? Is it bold font or capital letters? Maybe it’s frequency—if you load a person up with enough emails, they’ll have to open one eventually, right?
So I thought about what makes me click on one subject line over another and realized it’s none of those things. Yes, the packaging mattered, but not in the superficial way. It’s not about formatting because the more you cram into a subject line, the more it looks like spam. It’s not about quantity either. That’s a quick way to get sent to spam.
The key turned out to be understanding how people look at their inboxes. When they scan them, they look for something they need, enjoy, or relate to. They have to know exactly why they’re opening the message, and they don’t want to have to work for it.
When you stop to think about your experience receiving email, everything I’m saying becomes obvious, but we easily forget it as the sender. As business owners, we put so much time and energy into the offer that our brains trick us into thinking that the reader is sitting there eagerly waiting for what we send—and that they will immediately know that this is one worth opening. We forget that people skim their inboxes between meetings, in line for coffee, or while straightening up the house at the end of a long day. They’re making split-second decisions without feeling the weight we felt when writing it. The reader is not biased against you; they just aren’t primed for you. And so it becomes our job to make it easy for them to choose us.