Yesterday, we explored the first part of this series on reviewing your email marketing data. In our fictional case, you were sitting around the conference table with your marketing team, reviewing the data from January’s email campaign efforts. We went over delivery issues, which can affect roughly 20% of all emails in any given campaign. We also went over any subscriptions you might have encountered, and pinned it down to poor content. But this series isn’t just about identifying what went wrong, it’s about knowing what to look for and how to fix it.

In addition to delivery issues and unsubscribers, you should also be keeping an eye out for these trigger issues.

Design Issues Affect Readability and Interest

You’re unlikely to enter a crumbling and outdated restaurant to dine in, or purchase something from a store that clearly hasn’t invested in itself.

The same holds true for email campaigns.

Email campaigns are a total package. It doesn’t matter how great your product, content or offer is. All that matters first is the impression people will have of your company, product, and service at the first sight of any email campaign.

So while a poor design may not trigger an immediate unsubscribe and it may not affect the rate of new subscribers, it will affect your conversion rate.

As you’re sitting around the conference table and are noticing low conversion rates, then this is likely your problem.

Your other problem could be the content itself.

Email Campaign Content Is a Totally Different Beast

You can’t treat email campaign content the same way you would treat website content, a brochure or even a sales letter. This is a totally different beast.

First, rethink content.

Content isn’t just about the words on a page anymore when it comes to email marketing. It’s about everything that’s content related, including (in a way) the design. How the design segments or highlights content matters here. When you’re evaluating your content, consider the following questions:

Ask yourself, “What am I really trying to say here? What matters?”

In my experience, half of what you think matters doesn’t matter at all to the reader – it just matters to you. That said, if you are convinced of your message, ask yourself if is a single message or do you have several key things you mention in each campaign. If it’s the latter, this is where many companies fail – by making these segmented content pieces just be fillers that are nice to share or reflect their company, but aren’t meaningful in any real way to the reader.

Instead of filling up an email campaign with content as usual, try a different approach. Treat your email campaigns like mini publications that feature a totally unique full piece of content capped at about 800 words. Then below that or next to it, add some segmented boxes that can be candy bars that call to attention anything else you might want to highlight to your audience.

In a nutshell switch your strategy around. Focus on storytelling then brand boasting. And then use that story to highlight the brand.