The gentle art of corporate masturbation with free advice on what not to do in your emails

Why are email open rates down to as low as 3% on average? This sort of guff gives you a clue.

I am sitting in a hotel room in Vancouver – an excellent city – going through my emails when I see the e-mail above.

It reminds me that after people had stopped snoring through my keynote speech, my kind host at Canada Post showed some interesting statistics.

It seems that email open rates have slumped to 3%.

To give you a comparison open rates for direct mail when I looked some years ago were around 50%.

If you wonder why you and I don’t read our emails, look no further than the example I’ve shown.

1. The chief reason why people open or don’t open emails is, as a rule, the name of the sender. We tend to read stuff from people we know rather than those we don’t.
2. As I haven’t the vaguest idea who Andrew Lyons is, I only noticed this for professional reasons: I am always looking for examples of incompetence.
3. And since I didn’t know Andrew or what he does, I didn’t care that he had changed his looks, his name, or whatever services he renders. Maybe his mother does – who knows?
4. The whole thing is reversed out which will make it twice as hard to read.
5. It does not look like a personal message, which will slash readership further.
6. Having told me about the dramatic changes in his life it turns out that what Andrew really wants to talk about is getting my office clean. A lost cause – the landlord does all that.
7. I do not believe for one fraction of a second that “the marketplace” – whatever that is – asked his firm to change its name. I would suggest that “the marketplace” doesn’t give a toss.
8. It is just possible that “the marketplace” might be interested in some of the terrifying statistics bandied about after it has stopped reading, but I doubt it.
9. I doubt it because people only change cleaning firms when they are pissed off with the one they’ve got.
10. All this is a shame because someone has gone to great trouble to produce something almost entirely wrong. They may even have paid someone to do it.

If you think your email or direct mail or advertising or marketing or just about anything in your business could be improved, come to EADIM and we’ll tell you how.

It will probably cost you less than paying people to produce stuff that doesn’t work.

And I guarantee it will be more entertaining or your money back.