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Email newsletters are a funny thing. Half the time we don\\u2019t remember subscribing to them, the other half of the time we subscribe to them and never see them. If it feels like nobody is opening your emails, here\\u2019s perhaps why.

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This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I\\u2019m Dante St James.

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Every sales funnel, sales trainer, digital advisor and business consultant wants you to grow that email list. The main reasons they want you to is because you own your email list. Not Facebook. Not Google. You do. So you have control over what\\u2019s on it, what goes out through it and the tone of voice that\\u2019s going to be used. The trouble is that you might have trouble getting anyone to see what you\\u2019re sending.

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Ever since Gmail arrived, email marketing was living on borrowed time. Some estimate that the reach of email newsletters dropped almost 60% after use of Gmail became commonplace. When Hotmail, Outlook and other email systems picked up on the trend of spam blocking that took us to the point where we now see just under 20% of newsletter emails ever being read by a human. That\\u2019s a massive fall from grace. Some of that is the fault of relentless spam. After all some 90% of all email sent now is spam. Just peek in your junk or spam folder to see how much rubbish skips your inbox in one day to see how bad this is. And that\\u2019s just the stuff that gets past the email provider\\u2019s own firewalls that weed out the very worst stuff before it even gets sorted as spam.

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Then some of it is our own fault. After all, spam is made by people. People who tend to be marketers. People who are using email to relentlessly sell things to people.

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A lot of the trouble with email newsletter is that they are a bit of an after-thought by most companies. They\\u2019re poorly planned out, poorly laid out, poorly written and they make the biggest mistake in marketing: they\\u2019re all about the business sending them, and not about the person reading them.

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We tried to overcome that last point by adding pretend personalisation in them. \\u201cHello Susan\\u201d was supposed to sound better than, \\u201cHello Customer.\\u201d But was anyone really tricked into thinking that this email was written just for them, simply because the subject line said, \\u201cSusan, you won\\u2019t believe what just arrived!\\u201d

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Email newsletters are full of boasting, inside stories about staff, obligations to program and supply partners, logos and what wonderful things your business is doing. Which is exactly why no one really seems to read them anymore. Instead of starting from a point of \\u201cwhat\\u2019s in this for you\\u201d it goes straight for \\u201chere\\u2019s what\\u2019s important about us.\\u201d And think about it. The newsletters that you will read the most often are those that are not about the company itself, but about news, educational information, local alerts and things to do. Not \\u201cwho\\u2019s new at our Hervey Bay branch\\u201d or \\u201ca message from our CEO.\\u201d Nobody cares about your CEO, the new staff member or the award you just won. They care about themselves and how you can help them feel safe, solve a problem or have a more comfortable life. So if your newsletter doesn\\u2019t have any of that in it, then you probably shouldn\\u2019t bother sending it at all. And don\\u2019t hide that stuff as a \\u201ctip\\u201d at the end of the email. Lead with it. That way you have a fighting chance that someone will bother to read past it to your very important corporate communications that no one asked to receive.

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I\\u2019m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.