Ever spent your valuable time crafting an email to send to your contacts, held your breath while you hit the “send” button and then ended up with a less than thrilling email click through rate? Chances are, you’ve experienced this at least once. Email marketing can be an extremely effective way to connect with and nurture your contacts into customers. Of course, the effectiveness of email marketing lies in the assumption that your contacts will click the offer and/or download in your email to feed the nurturing process. Here are a few helpful tips to help increase your email click through rate:
1. Increase Your Open Rate
Just as email marketing effectiveness is dictated largely by who clicks, who clicks is dictated largely by who opens. The probability of getting someone to click the links in your email increases exponentially when someone actually opens your email. Increasing an email’s open rate can be done in a number of ways but there are a few main things to remember.
- Have a clear opt-in process. Make sure people know what they are signing up for (i.e. how often can they expect to hear from you, what types of information can they expect to receive, etc.)
- Make sure the recipient knows exactly where the email came from. You’ve told them what to expect and they have still decided that they want your emails. Now, they need to know they came from you.
- Compelling subject lines are important. Typical email inboxes cut subject lines off at around 50 characters – for mobile, it’s about 20 characters. Make the most of those characters.
- The preview text is equally important. More often than not, someone decides whether or not to open the email based on the line of text displayed under the subject line in their inbox. Use this space to elaborate on the subject line – it’s a bit longer and allows you to tell recipients more about what’s inside the email.
2. Be Relevant
A blanket message to a large group of contacts rarely appeals to everyone. Take the time to segment your list of contacts and tailor your messaging, offer and subject lines to their needs and pain points. A survey from eMarketer found that 39% of people who used email list segmentation saw higher open rates and 28% saw lower opt-out/unsubscribe rates. If you send out a targeted offer or content download that appeals to the recipient, they are more willing to open the email and click that offer thus giving your campaign a higher email click through rate. Lists can be segmented based on buyer persona, stage of the buying cycle, primary pain point, purchase or download history, website activity, etc.
3. Be Clear
Keep the copy only as long as it needs to be. People don’t want to read emails that are as long as the chapter of a book. Be concise and very clear about what you are offering. Make sure that the call-to-action is very obvious and in your face so people know they are supposed to click. A simple text hyperlink call-to-action probably won’t do the trick to increase you email click through rate. A bold and eye catching designed call-to-action just might. What’s more effective?
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4. Mobile Optimized
Research by Comscore and Markle shows that 70 million people read emails on their mobile device and 43% of people check their emails on mobile devices 4 or more times per day. Don’t miss out on catching this huge segment of your audience. Optimize your emails for mobile devices and make sure that the CTAs are large enough to see and to click on a cell phone or tablet.
5. Have Fun & Be Interesting
Don’t keep sending the same old stale email with sales-y copy and stock images. Try including a video or incorporating humor. HubSpot poked fun at itself by creating a video congratulating people on avoiding their sales reps and sent it out via email. The email’s click through rate (CTR) was 583% higher than the industry average of 2.4%.
If you’re interested in viewing their video…
Our own fun and lighthearted holiday email last year garnered a CTR that was more than double our typical email click through rate. This email included a recap of our year as well as a recap of our office holiday pub crawl in video/musical form:
If you’re interested in viewing our holiday video…
Remember these 5 tips for your next campaign to make sure you get the best email click through rate possible!
