How often do you open an email and immediately hit delete?
You are not alone. Many businesses struggle with email marketing — either their messages get ignored, end up in spam, or worse, cause unsubscribes.
I’m going to break down why email marketing often fails, and share 4 modern, tested tips that actually drive engagement, clicks, and results.
Why Email Marketing Often Fails
Not Having a Clear Strategy or Goal
This is actually one of the biggest problems with ALL marketing but also applies to email marketing. If you are sending emails sporadically or “just to stay in touch” how do you know if it is effective or not?
How do you fix this? The answer is simple. Tie every campaign and every email to a specific action (download, RSVP, buy, etc.)
Overly Salesy or Generic Messaging
If your email is all “ME ME ME” while providing no value you will quickly lose your audience. By the same token, offering a one-size-fits-all email if you address a wide audience, makes it hard to touch the pain points your target client actually faces.
How do you fix this? Since you are going email marketing, you want more business (duh!) but be careful offer value and balance promos with helpful insights or entertainment.
Poor Design or Mobile Experience
Having a cluttered layout with columns and tables is not the way email marketing works in 2025. And avoid hard-to-read fonts that may be unintelligible on a mobile device.
How do you fix this? Start by thinking / designing from a mobile-first perspective that puts your brand out there and uses easy-to-read fonts.
No Tracking or Optimization
Once you have sent the email, rubbing your hands together and saying “ooh, that is another task taken care of” is not the way to have effective email marketing. In fact sending the email is just the first step!
How do you fix this? At a minimum, make sure you have integrated with Google Analytics. To track each email separately, use UTM codes. Then track metrics like number of opens, number of clicks, how many bounces and unsubscribes. All this data will help you understand and improve your email marketing. (EduCyber helps with this).
5 Fresh Tips to Supercharge Your Email Marketing
Auto-Post to Social Media and to Your Website at the Same Time the Message is Sent
Having a consistent message and brand across all your channels helps drive engagement and helps with SEO. Repurposing content is a ridiculously easy way to stay in front of your clients and potential clients. Remember, some folks will only encounter your content on one channel so sharing across all your channels is the way to go.
When sending your email, most platforms (like the one EduCyber uses with clients) allow you to integrate the posting directly during the sending process.
Test Send Times Based on Engagement
Tuesday at 10am doesn’t work for everyone. Depending on your business model, your hours of operation, and who your target market is, you should try different days and times of day. Look at whether you are business to consumer (B2C) or business to business (B2B). Dig into your stats to see what days and times have worked in the past and then experiment.
Segment by Engagement Level
Those who regularly open and read your emails want to hear from you. More casual readers likely need a different message and folks who have forgotten why they signed up in the first place, definitely need to hear a different message.
We’ve heard of a realtor who sent the same message each month, knowing most folks weren’t reading it anyway. But he still managed to stay top of mind simply by that monthly touch. Sending the same thing is NOT what we recommend but creating content based on each level of potential or existing client is. Most sales people have a method of categorizing leads as hot, warm and cold, why shouldn’t your email marketing be the same?
Add Personal Touches Without Full Personalization
If creating segments and creating content for each sounds too labor intensive, you can still add personal touches to your email. You can use a conversational tone and make sure that the email has your “voice” instead of being overly formal. Try using friendly subject lines (and don’t forget to test different ones). When Barack Obama sent an email with the subject line “Hey” it got an incredible number of opens. Make sure to provide helpful content, not just ads, that helps to establish you as a leader in your industry.
Use Click Maps and Heat Tracking
Ready to get more sophisticated information about how and where your subscribers are clicking? Just like heatmaps on a website can help you better understand how visitors are interacting with your site, knowing where people click, not just if they do can provide insights that help you continually improve your emails. This can impact the layout, button placement and other visuals you integrate into your campaign.
Often, for good reason, these tools like Email Heatmaps (emailheatmaps.com) are third party tools instead of being offered directly through an email platform. These are sophisticated tools that not every business owner wants or needs. But if you are ready to take your email marketing to the next level, then it makes sense to integrate one of these.
Often, perhaps too often, business owners wearing too many hats throw their email marketing campaign together without enough planning on WHAT they want to accomplish, HOW the email campaign fits into that plan and then puts the time and energy into the EXECUTION of the plan to clearly understand the results.
If you are ready to bring your email campaigns back to life, whether you need a simple template or a full-service approach, EduCyber’s email marketing package is built to scale with you.
