I met with a prospect a few weeks ago who had tried email marketing and said, “It didn’t work for us.” I asked him what he wanted email marketing to do and he said, “Get us more business.”

It’s a long and winding road from “send-out-email” to “measurable-increase-in-business.” Plotting the route between marketing expenditures and generating revenue has been a challenge for marketing since long before the Internet was a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye.

Online marketing in general and email specifically do represent progress in making that connection but it does still require planning, measuring, testing, re-testing and continuously improving the program to see the benefits.

Below are three reasons your email campaign may not be working:

1. It’s not structured  around a specific objective

While “get  us more business” is a legitimate objective, the prospect I spoke with hadn’t structured his email campaign to actually do that.

With a sales process, there are a number of touches or steps that need to occur before a prospect becomes a customer. A campaign, a series of emails, should be designed to bring people along that process.

For example, if you assume reading the email is the first step, its closing call to action should prompt the reader to take the next step, for example, visiting your website or downloading a white paper to learn more.

2. It doesn’t end with a call to action—or it ends with too many calls to action

If I finish reading your email, am a little interested, but don’t have a call to action prompting me to further action, I’m moving on to the next item in my inbox. 

And if I’m a little interested, but there’s more than one or two choices for my next step—I’m also moving on.

That’s because when people are going through their email, they’re trying to get through it quickly. All those other messages still clogging up their box are weighing on them. They want to keep moving toward eliminating those—not too mention all the other tasks on their ‘to-do’ lists.

When they’ve finished scanning your email, if they’re faced with three or four choices for their next step, they’re struck with decision paralysis and it’s much easier to exit and move on.

The natural inclination is to provide plenty of options: “Visit our website” or “schedule a demo” or “download our white paper” or “contact us.”  Common sense says, let the reader decide.

In fact, given all those choices, the reader will choose none. (Chip and Dan Heath discussed studies that reveal the way multiple choices create decision paralysis in their book, Switch.)

3. Results don’t inform subsequent campaigns

Email is a great way to learn what your prospects are interested in. Every time they click on something, they’re telling you. Use the analytics offered by your email service provider to determine what topics interest them. See what calls to action get the most clicks. Track prospects’ progress through your sales funnel and see what role your online marketing played. Take all that information back to your email campaign and tweak accordingly.

Jakob Nielsen, the famous web usability guru, says people don’t read online—they scan.

Unlike some gurus, Nielsen has facts to back up his proclamations. He actually observes how humans interact with a website, so there’s good reason to listen to him.

He’s amassed a lot of good data, and if you could summarize all of it into one idea, it’s that people online are looking for specific, reliable information. And they’re usually in a hurry. Good SEO will get people to your site but if the page where they arrive doesn’t quickly satisfy the need that drove them to the Web, you lose them.

Nielsen also points out that your site visitors don’t think like you. They don’t share your knowledge or assumptions so testing copy effectiveness with people outside the company is an important step.

This link goes to the web page template I use to remind me of these points (and some others).

If your offering is so “innovative” & “cutting-edge,” why are you describing it with the same tired language everyone else uses to explain theirs?

For starters, words like “solution,” and “proprietary” put your audience to sleep. They rely on the same tired ideas everyone else is using to market their product. Someone shopping for what you’re selling has already read these claims a dozen times by the time they arrive at your site. It’s a good way to blend in with the competition and numb your audience’s brains.

Even more dangerous is what using these words does to the quality of your own thinking about your offering. Our thoughts are manifested by the language we use. If you’re bilingual, you know, some words can’t be translated between languages; in fact, some thoughts can’t truly exist without the words we need to say them to ourselves.

When you think about your offering in the same terms as your competition, you’re numbing your own brain too, and missing an opportunity to make a fresh statement that will attract a prospect’s attention.

“Solution” is a great example of a word that creates white noise. It has its place, but if it shows up more than once on a webpage, it’s a clear sign that your copy needs to be more concretely descriptive. What words could you substitute that rely on the senses? What does a customer see, hear, feel, taste or smell when their problem is solved?

Put yourself in your reader’s shoes for a minute… Why are you spending your valuable time doing research online? What do you hope to accomplish? Now read the home page—or a relevant landing page—on your website, and then look at your competitors’ sites.

Differentiating your offering by describing it in bright, juicy language—the kinds of words that paint a picture for your readers—will help them see they’ve arrived at a website that’s worth their time and that they’ve found a company that understands their problem.

Want to see some lists of words to eliminate (or at least consider carefully before using)?

Look here and here.

I stumbled across this interesting article, "Five Reasons to Keep a Work Diary". To a writer, of course, this sounds like a good idea, but it’s actually worthwhile advice for anyone.

The idea is that a few minutes of recording what worked and what didn't, before you close up shop, gives you a “do-over”—a new way to look at the day, learn from it and see that maybe it wasn’t as bad as you thought.

Have you ever had a “shower moment”? All you have to do in there is bathe, and with so little demand on your brain, a brilliant new idea can present itself without your conscious mind blocking it.

Writing about your work day—even for as little as ten minutes—pushes your brain into new ways of expressing itself. It works differently than a shower moment but the results are the same. By re-structuring your thoughts in the form of text, insights that would otherwise be lost come to the fore.

Maybe you wrestled mightily—to no avail—with a way to communicate your idea to your team or a customer. Spending ten minutes to freewrite about it opens pathways in your brain you couldn’t see when the high weeds of the day were too thick to push through.

Aggravated by a phone call that went badly? Re-living it on paper (or your monitor) will reveal clues for setting the situation on better footing—or reveal that it didn’t go as badly as you thought.

Hate writing? Make your work diary an oral one. Use a Dictaphone (or your smart phone—surely there’s an app for that). On your drive home, babble incoherently into the thing and listen back later. The act of verbally confiding to your recorder can also free your mind. You may find yourself, mid-rant, coming upon a gem of genius.

According to the author of the article, Richard Branson wrote his bestsellers by referring back to and reworking his daily diary ruminations. Who knows? By the end of 365 ten-minute work diary entries, you may find you have the foundation of a book, or an e-book.

The trick is disciplining yourself to do it, especially on a bad day, but I've tried it and this kind of daily reflection really does pay you back for the effort.