The world of email marketing has become hyper-competitive over the last decade. As one of the leading marketing streams, email offers a high ROI and a way of instantly delivering messages to your customers. Yet, due to how accessible this marketing channel is, most companies now launch some form of email marketing campaign every quarter.
In light of its popularity, users are inundated with 100s of emails each day. In fact, the average user receives around 121 emails every single day, with the vast majority of those coming directly from businesses that they have subscribed to. With the sheer quantity of different marketing emails coming into a customer’s inbox every single day, businesses need to strive to stand out from the crowd.
If companies don’t take precautions to create unique emails that stand out, they’ll suffer from extremely low click-through rates. In this article, we’ll dive into the world of click-through rates, documenting how businesses can use new marketing strategies and implement methods to increase them. We’ll also touch on why businesses should focus on increasing the click-through rate of their email marketing stream.
Let’s dive right in.
Why click-through rates are important
While email open rate is one thing, click-through rate is the real goal of the vast majority of email campaigns. Of course, we need to have a high open rate to get traffic to links we include within an email. But, if only one out of even 100 opens of your email is resulting in a click to your other content, then you likely need to rethink your strategy.
Click-through rate is a representation of the total number of clicks that any content within your email receives out of the total number of people that opened the email. Click-through could refer to the user clicking on your website from your email signature, on a CTA within the email, or on a ‘Learn More’ button that links them to other content on your site.
The click-through rate is vital because this is where all of the ROI of your email campaign comes from. Instead of having to get customers from social media or through content marketing, email is a direct form of connection that can inspire people to take a look at your website. From there, with a purpose in mind, they will be ready to purchase something that generates value for your business.
A company with a high click-through rate is one that’s on track for success.
How to improve click-through rates on email
Click-through rates are largely a response to the content and structure of your emails. If someone clicks on your email and instantly sees a wall of text, they’re not very likely to continue on to any further content that you have linked in the email. Alternatively, if your design is gaudy and difficult to read, people just won’t bother and will click off without engaging with your email.
With that in mind, here are some strategies that your business can use to improve the click-through rate on your emails.
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Rethink your design
Email design is an ever-changing medium. In some years, a maximalist style with lots of color, animated characters, and life will be the winning choice for design firms. In other years, a more pared-down approach with muted colors and a minimalistic style is more effective.
By crafting email campaigns that follow the leading design principles of that moment, you’re more likely to create content that is visually appealing to your audience. If a user encounters a design that they can relate to, they’re more likely to follow the various CTA instructions that you have throughout your email.
Speaking of CTAs, they are one of the core elements that high-conversion emails always include. You should include several CTAs throughout your email to capture as many people as possible. Phrases like:
- Learn more
- Read on
- Shop now
- Discover how
…will inspire users to click on your email links and move through to your website.
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Personalize for your audience
Despite what’s currently trendy, it’s important to understand what your audience enjoys most. While following the current design trends will ensure that you appease the general audience that is reading your emails, it won’t do much when it comes to building up a specific style for your customer base.
Instead, you should run A/B tests over time to trace what your customers respond best to. For example, by running two similar emails to two halves of your audience, you’ll be able to see which people generally respond best to. Over time, you can A/B test several elements of your email marketing strategy, looking for small improvements.
You can test every single element, including design choices, copy choices, and even the extent to which you personalize your emails. At the very least, you should include the customer’s actual name in the email. However, you could take this much further by creating small user segments and directly appealing to those groups of your audience.
Only through A/B experimentation will you truly hone your email marketing strategy.
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Include attention-grabbing final touches
One additional element that can set your emails apart from others is to include small touches that create extra points of interest. The easiest way of doing this is to use an email signature. These small spaces pack a big punch, giving you additional room to include personal information, extra marketing materials, or even just a simple message to make your customers simple.
Most email signature examples will include personal information, as this allows a customer to connect on a human level to the sender, which can inspire more clicks. Equally, you can put final CTAs into your email signature, providing another opportunity to inspire your audience to click on a desired point in your email.
While these are only small changes that you can make to your email, they are a fast, easy, and effective way of slightly boosting the click-through rates of your emails.
Final thoughts
Email isn’t going anywhere. As one of the leading strategies that help to generate new leads, share information with customers, and deliver news, email is a phenomenal way of keeping your customers in the loop. It also helps that email is consistently one of the leading methods of generating ROI via marketing.
Yet, to get all the various benefits that businesses can expect from email marketing, they need to ensure that the campaigns they create and run are as optimized as possible. By following the examples and methods outlined in this article, your marketing team will be well on the way to creating winning campaigns.
