It is not a secret that email marketing is a great way to connect with your leads and customers. But you want subscribers to open your emails and respond to what you’re offering. Email click-through rate is one of the most important metrics that measures the responsiveness of your emails. If you re not getting enough clicks, that means low income.
While the quality of your email copy and the product you are offering matter in your marketing arsenal, it is not enough. If people are not clicking your links, you may waste a lot of time and drain your marketing budget.
In this post I’m going to show some effective ways to improve your click through rate.
Email List Segmentation.
If you’ve never used email marketing before, then list segmentation is a thing you should consider in your campaigns. Email list segmentation is a technique where you divide your list, based on different conditions. The purpose of this technique is to send relevantly and target messages to a specific group of people.
If you send the same email to your entire subscribers, don’t be surprised if you get a low engagement. Your contacts have different interest and needs and may not respond positively to the same email. To get a higher click-through rate, segment your list of subscribers and send relevant content to them.
For example, you’re offering a free incentive in exchange for people’s information. A segment of contacts did not download that free incentive. In this case, you should separate that group people and send them a reminder sequence.
When you send the right message to the right person, you will get a high CTR and better engagement from your list.
Personalize your email
Have you ever received an email that is not relevant to you? You feel like there is a robot behind it, not a human being. This feeling does not encourage you to click, or even unsubscribe.
That feeling applies as well to your subscribers as well. You need to send an email like you’re addressing them alone.
Personalized emails are one of the best ways to improve your click-through rate. People are more likely to engage with your emails if you send them content that fir their unique behaviors, needs, and interest.
Brands are using personalized emails more than ever to create compelling interactions for subscribers and customers.
Click-through rates improve by an average of 14% when using personalized email messages. (Aberdeen)
Here are some easy ways to send personalized emails:
Include your subscriber name. While This technique is new, but it can be very effective. Instead if adding subscribers name only at the beginning of the email, try to add it in the middle or at the end.
Ask key questions. You can send a short survey right away when joined your list. Questions like why did subscribe to our list? What do you think about that?…etc. These questions will give enough data to send a more targeted email to your list.
Create a buyer segment. People who buy from you are likely to buy again. You can send them product recommendations, a bonus, or exclusive content.
Write better email copy.
Finding the right words to write better email content for your subscribers can be frustrating. I often find myself writing and rewriting the same sentence several times to find the perfect style.
The best thing you can do to write a better email and get a higher click-through rate is to set a clear goal. What do you want your subscribers to do? Respond to a survey, read a blog post, or buy a product.
Giving too many directions in a single email can confuse your audience and let them doing nothing.
When you look at the email of the best marketers, several things stand out. One of them is the word count. Since online readers are easily distracted, most subscribers are not patient to read long emails.
The shorter email usually are the most responsive and get higher CTR. So keep your email content simple and shorter as possible.
Also, try to include animated GIFS if possible. Since human being responds to visual animation, emails with images and animations get high CTR.
Use The Sense Of Urgency.
Marketing is all about persuading and changing your targeted audience behavior. Knowing your audience and understanding human psychology is crucial in marketing.
Since the psychology of marketing is a vast field, one of the most important principle is a sense of urgency.
Your customers have to go through a long process until they decide to buy. Depending on what you are promoting in your email, sense of urgency helps speed up that process.
Also, it gives your readers a higher degree of focus to make a decision quickly, and encourage those already consider buying to take action before they miss out.
One of the common ways to use these tactics is to set a deadline. Whether you’re offering a coupon, hot deals, or ticket to an event, you will get higher CTR when you set a deadline.
Another way to create urgency is to use words like time-sensitive, 10 copies left, and limited time to initiate your customers to take action.
Send Triggered Emails.
If you are involved in online marketing for some time, you’ve probably heard marketers say that “The money is in the list“. The basic of this proverb is that you collect a decent number of names and email addresses of potential customers and send the same message to the entire list.
I strongly disagree. If the money is in the list, then spammers would be millionaires.
Automate email or triggered email is a great alternative and has proven its effectiveness over the last years.
Triggered email is simply a technique that allows marketers to send email based on customer behavior, profile, and preferences.
Triggered email campaigns have been proven to generate a better result than newsletter or product announcement because they’re relevant and timely.
The majority of online marketers rely only on traditional email marketing and are not taking advantage of marketing automation. If you’re one of them, then you’re missing out.
According to Smart Insights, triggered emails reach 71% higher open rates and 102% higher click-through rates compared to general email newsletters. While this method sounds difficult and complex at first, especially if you are not familiar yet with email marketing, triggered emails are highly effective.
Optimize for mobile.
A successful email marketing campaign is all about your audience’s needs and interests. Today’s online marketers should take into consideration how, where, and when people are engaging with email they send. Mobile email opens and CTR have seen explosive growth, and it is time to think about your email marketing strategy.
It is not surprising that nearly half of all email is opened on mobile devices. Litmus reported.
To get the most CTR from your email marketing effort make sure your email content is scannable and easy to read.
Small paragraphs and white spaces make the content easy to digest. Also, do not use lot links in a small space.
Use responsive buttons for the call to action instead of links. Buttons are easy for people to click on when using a touchscreen.
Most CR services provide mobile-friendly newsletter which fit well for mobile screen size.
Do A/B testing
Keeping your CTR higher is a complex process because many things come at play. The best thing you can do to figure out what works and what could be improved is to test a lot of things.
In the context of email marketing, testing means sending two variations of one email campaign to two groups of subscribers, with the goal of figuring out which variation of that campaign garners the best results.
There infinite things you need to test to get keep your CTR improving. If you’ve never done A/B test before, then start with the key elements of your emails.
First, start to test different subject lines and figure out which one your audience respond the most. If you get more people opening your emails, then you will get more who may click your links.
Second, you should test your content. Do your subscribers prefer long-form emails or they like shorter ones. Finally starting playing with a call to action placements, colors, and designs. Small tests like these are great ways to improve your CTR.
A/B is an effective tactic to make your email marketing effort profitable for you and valuable for your audience.
Include Many Links.
Another great way to improve your CTR is to give more opportunities your subscribers to click. Let say a user has to go through many paragraphs of text with a single link. Emails like this one won’t generate a lot of clicks because users need time to study what you are offering when they face your first link. Or they may lose interest by the time they get to the link.
Every email you send should include 2 links at least. At usually prefer 3 links. Of course, if you fill your email with multiple links, you’re going to piss off your subscribers.
A clever apply this is to put a link in the first block of text, another one in the middle, and one link at the bottom. This method alone can increase your CTR because users have more than one opportunity to click and see what you’re offering.
Keep a good email list hygiene
There are hundreds of blog post, webinars, and courses that teach you how to grow your email list. While a large email list is an important factor in your marketing success, it should never be your main focus. The engagement and responsiveness of your list are more important than the size. 100 targeted and engaging contacts are better than 500 people who are not opening your emails and clicking your links.
To keep your click-through rate climbing you need to clean up your list regularly, which means getting rid of cold subscribers and bounced emails.
A dead list can hurt your deliverability and push down your open and click. So don’t be afraid to delete dead subscribers.
Cut out keywords that trigger spam filters
Accord to spamlaws.com “Spam accounts for 14.5 billion messages globally per day. In other words, spam makes up 45% of all emails“
In other words, more than 100 billion emails are reported as spam every day. Email program filters certain emails as spam because many unknown contacts send viruses, pirated programs, and illicit activities. To check this fact just take a quick look at your spam folder.
To make your emails delivered and get higher click rates you need to avoid using certain keywords in your email content that trigger spam filter. I’m talking about words like “free money“, “no credit card required“,”MLM“, and “big bucks“.
