Why Your Emails Are Being Deleted

Most days I am out during the day running to and from appointments. I doubt that my day-to-day life differs from anyone else’s. I rely on my Blackberry to deliver my email so I can respond and stay in touch with staff, clients, and prospects.

No matter if you are a Blackberry or iPhone user, my guess is that you have your email sent to your phone. This is a standard must-have feature today. That being said, what gets my goat faster than someone cutting me off on the road? An email that is one giant image.

Let’s examine what happens.
You want to invite me or inform me of something you think is important. You hire a designer or use one of the DIY packages and create some image with all the information and hype to grab my attention. You spend time and money to create this image, struggle with the wording, the colors, and imagery, and then spend more time looking it over and over and over again to be certain it will knock my socks off.

You then load that image into an email and blast it out.

We get your email probably first on our mobile phone.

We can’t see the image because it is too large or too time consuming to download to our phone, and so we don’t see any of the information contained in that invite or message.

We probably just delete it, I usually do. Maybe we save it for when we get back to the office with our grown-up computers, and maybe we remember to go back and look at what you sent, or maybe your email just slips into the aging emails with newer emails piling up and burying your email even deeper down the inbox to not be seen again until we find the time to do some inbox clean up.
Now, what was it that you wanted me to know about?

That’s right. Stop putting all of your time, effort and money in to how your email looks, and start putting your time into how your message is experienced. If your message is really important, then make sure we can see it!
If pretty is important then consider giving me the details or at least enough information to encourage me to hold on to the message and click through to a landing page. This way I get the information I need to decide if I am at least interested and you get the data from the click-through and gather valuable metrics as to how many people were actually interested enough to learn more.

Why is this a pet peeve you ask?

It bothers me when I think about how much time and money a company might spend, possibly with a ‘professional’ and does it in a way that pretty much limits or guarantees failure. I realize that sometimes marketing is more art than science, but industry best practices can usually make up for inexperience or bad judgment. Try sending your email with no images at all and see if you get better results. Then find a happy medium between pretty and practical.