You know that your product or solution is the best thing since sliced bread.

But do your prospects and customers know?

More importantly … do they care?

When you send marketing emails, the delete button is your worst enemy (followed closely by the unsubscribe button – which is actually even deadlier but at least the recipient opened your email to get to it). It’s critically important to capture your reader’s attention immediately and then retain it until they’ve read and absorbed your message, and — in a perfect world — taken action.

Let’s look into where consumers are when your email finds its way to them.

According to MediaPost, consumers typically check their emails:

• When they’re bored (75%)
• On vacation (69%)
• Watching TV (63%)
• At night and on the weekends (59%)
• Still in bed in the morning (50%)
• At night when they can’t sleep (46%)
• Spending time with friends and family (45%)

As an email consumer yourself, you’re probably nodding along with at least some of these findings.

But here’s the kicker, are these consumers really looking for — or waiting for — your email while they’re bored, on vacation, or watching TV? Of course the answer is NO. So how can you break through when the consumers are checking their email while multitasking?

Again, it comes back to thinking about the prospects’ state of mind.

Let’s reiterate one of the basics for email marketing: knowing your audience and knowing them well. Our suggestion is to do some homework first.

Only send emails to your list after analyzing who they are and what they want. This analysis will help you create emails that are relevant and of interest to your emailing list. Get and hold their attention with something that is relevant and meaningful.

Then, think about what your audience are doing in their spare time; you can better target them when they’re on vacation, or when they’re bored at a family function. Without knowing your prospects and customers well, you’ll be wasting both your own time and resources, and theirs.

Analyzing your email list is the first step to creating thoughtful, meaningful, and personable email marketing. Do not skip over this step and have to back track later… take the time now to really understand and get to know your audience; then, the real work of writing that perfect marketing email will be that much easier.

Even if they’re on vacation when they get it.