Top 5 Reasons Why Leads Aren’t Opening Your B2B Emails

Marketing your product to B2B over email is notoriously hard. Since you are sending emails to work email addresses, your emails are competing against important work-related communication. Getting proper attention in that competitive work-related inbox is a herculean task. Not only it’s harder to get noticed, but it’s also much easier to irritate B2B audiences. 

Despite all the challenges, it’s not impossible to run effective B2B email campaigns that will keep your leads engaged with your brand and eventually convert them into customers. If you have a problem with your email Open Rates, it might be because of the following 5 reasons. Keep on reading to see how you can fix those issues and get more engagement to your emails.

Reason 1: Weak Subject Lines

What’s the first thing that you notice in the inbox? You guessed it – the Subject Line. You probably have been given the advice to make your subject lines strong and intriguing, but still, it’s easier said than done. 

The subject line shouldn’t be the last thing you write hastily before sending out an email, it should be the provenance of the email. The subject line should be based on the goal of that specific email. Did you send it to inform, promote, or invite to action? 

Here are some specific tips that will help you pique the interest of your leads from the first glance:

• Ask a question.
• Make it brief.
• Tell them what’s inside.
• Call to action.
• Use numbers (if applicable).
• Avoid false promises.

Also, don’t make your subject line too long. The optimal length, according to Campaign Monitor, is 41 characters. You don’t want the subject line to get cut off in the inbox. Also, aim to give a clear idea of the content of the email from the very beginning of the subject line. 

Reason 2: Bad Previews or No Previews

Email previews are a snippet of text that appears under the sender’s name. These are your second chance at getting your leads interested in the email at a glance and a great opportunity for complimenting your subject line with a bit more information about the content of your email. 

Preview texts have two types: visible and invisible. The first one is the very first sentence of your email that automatically appears in the inbox as a little preview. If you want, you can write your first sentence in a way that compliments your subject line. It’s not always easy to do this and if your first sentence is long, it’s gonna get cut off. 

This is where the invisible preview text shines. With a little bit of HTML and CSS magic, you can write a custom preview text for your emails that isn’t visible in the body. To make a text invisible in the body of your email, you need to use this HTML code. [Source: litmus]

<div style=”display:none;font-size:1px;color:#333333;line-height:1px;max-height:0px;max-width:0px;opacity:0;overflow:hidden;”>

  Insert preview text here.            

</div>

As to the content of the preview text itself, keep in mind that the length of this text ranges from 40 to 140 characters depending on the email client. Here are a couple of tips for improving your preview text:

• Use this space to summarize the content of your email.
• Avoid repeating the subject line.
• Use personalization.
• Include a CTA.
• Use keywords. 
• And again, be honest and avoid false statements.

Reason 3: Excessive Amount of Emails

If you send out emails too often, people will just get irritated and put you in their spam folder. This reflects badly on your future B2B email marketing efforts in several ways. First, the email client will start to automatically put your emails in the junk folder without even showing them in the main inbox. Second, if many people do this, the email servers will blacklist your email address as a spammer.

Usually, the best practice of email campaign frequency is bi-weekly emails. As in most cases, it’s not about the quantity of the emails but rather about the quality. So if you send more often than that, cut down the number and concentrate on increasing the value in each email. Alternatively, you can let your leads select how often they want to receive an email from you in the form.

Reason 4: Disinterested Leads

If you don’t want continuously low email open rates, from time to time, ask your leads if they are interested in receiving more emails from you. It doesn’t make sense to keep sending emails to disinterested leads. If the number of those people is high, the chances of your emails reaching to inboxes will decrease over time. 

So from time to time, send an email to leads that haven’t opened your last 4 emails and notify them that you won’t be sending more emails. You can use a subject line like “Open this Email to Keep Your Subscription.” Give them an option to keep their subscription by clicking a link in the body of the email.

Reason 5: Only Promotional Emails

Don’t just send promotional emails. Aim to send more informative content rather than just try to sell. Avoid sending promotional emails to new leads, you don’t want to start off your “email relationship” with selling. Instead, gradually build to it by sending informative content, like emails about new blog posts, features, tutorials, etc. It’s also a good idea to send promotional emails only to those leads that actively engage with your emails as there’s a higher chance they will convert.

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By following the five tips above, getting your emails noticed by your B2B leads shouldn’t be so challenging anymore. Remember, the more the value in your emails, the more people will look forward to receiving more emails from you. 

Need help with your B2B Email Campaigns? 

Feel free to reach out to us at PMG360 for a free consultation. We’ve been helping B2B companies to promote their products via email for more than a decade. Thanks to our vast experience across various industries we can help you achieve your goals with minimized trial and error. Reach out to us to discuss how we can help you create and manage Email Marketing Campaigns that keep your leads engaged. Sign up for a free consultation today!