With my experience in the email marketing industry I have come to find that so often newsletter marketing campaigns fail to succeed because they are not correctly targeted. Targeted Email marketing is a relatively cheap direct marketing channel. Because email marketing is so cost-effective, email marketers tend to get just a little too trigger-happy. It's no surprise that sending masses of bulk email campaigns will result in nobody really opening your emails, particularly irrelevant one's.

Email marketing campaigns need to be highly targeted in order to be successful. Not only do irrelevant emails (wrong audience) waste time and money, it also lowers your 'open rate'. Additionally, it does more damage than just that. You're more likely to get unsubscribes, and also more likely to irritate people with emails that they find to be irrelevant. This does much to your brand reputation; and I don't mean that in a good way.

Targeted email marketing takes additional factors into account like age, interests, gender etc. and breaks this down so as to send newsletters to clients who specifically like IPods for example. With targeted email marketing, your click-through rate and open-rate will definitely increase, while unsubscribes will decrease. At the same time, your brand image and reputation shall me maintained, while you save valuable time and money.

There are more factors to consider if you're wondering why your email newsletter subscribers have not opened your email newsletters or clicked-through. Here are just a few:

- Personalization is missing. You need to address email recipients by their name and your 'From' name needs to be that of your company.

- You have not segmented your email subscribers correctly or your information is out-of-date.

- You have not cleaned out your list recently enough; this results in money wasted on inactive email addresses or people that never open you emails.

- Time of send. You need to do research on the best times to send; for example: it's never a good idea to send bulk marketing emails on a weekend. Also, you need to consider time zones.

- Frequency of send. Overloading subscribers with emails does so much more harm than good; your emails will never be opened if you send too many. On the same note; sending too infrequently can result in your subscribers forgetting who you are or why they signed up.

- Purchasing patterns. If you track purchases it is much easier to target future emails to get additional sales.

If the above factors are taken into account, then your targeted email marketing is bound to succeed.