Like you, I get a ton of promotional emails from companies every day. I’m not sure what your reaction is to these but I often find myself scrolling through and deleting many of them without reading them. This deluge of emails is a large part of why we rarely use our newsletter. Sure, the first few I get from a company I’ve worked with in the past, I open and scroll through. After those first few emails though, I tend to know which ones I care about and which I don’t.

Some of these companies win points in my eyes by telling me right up front whether I should care. They strategically use their subject line to tell me what the email is promoting.

50% off cat food?

I don’t own a cat; delete.

50% off kids clothes; yes, please.

I appreciate that they’re making my email management easier. They probably hate that I’m not increasing their open rates.

Recently, as I was going through my morning “delete all these promotional emails” ritual, I got to a particular email and thought “Why should I care?“. I was genuinely confused that some of these companies made a point of regularly sending me emails that were – at best – the same repetitive content. Hooray, you’ve got new products! Why should I care? Congrats, it’s Memorial Day! Why did you send me an email about that? You sent me an email full of unformatted links? Thanks, I guess?

If you regularly send email campaigns, take the time to look at them from your customer’s perspective. Before you click send, ask yourself why your customer would care about your email. They’ll likely care if you’re launching a new business or offering a discount on products they use regularly. If you’re sending purely for your own purposes – hoping that they remember you, open your email and purchase something – with no real benefit to them, eventually they will stop reading your emails.

As much as we as business owners need to have goals for any of our campaigns, including email campaigns, we also need to be constantly cognizant of our customer’s take on things. If you’re just sending them things to send them things, you may want to re-think your strategy. At best, they’ll ignore you. At worst, they’ll unsubscribe and stop seeing things they might actually have been interested in.