We receive dozens (or even hundreds) of promotional emails every day. Some of them get opened; however, in most cases such emails go through our inboxes unnoticed.
If you want to improve the CTR of your brand’s emails, you ‘ll have to be clever and stand out among competitors. How can you do that? By following these tips.
10 Tips to Grow Your Click-Through Rate
Run email subject line A/B tests
The first thing you have to work on in order to improve your CTR is the open rate. After all, if a user does not open your email, they won’t see the offer this email contains and therefore won’t click on it.
Email subject line is the first thing your subscribers see when an email drops to their inbox. If this subject line catches their attention, they will most likely open this email. A/B testing helps you to try different subject lines until you find the ones that really work.
Keep it brief
Email’s text is another thing to pay attention to. It has to be short yet appealing and informative at the same time.
Keep in mind that subscribers get bored easily. When you send them interesting and concise emails, they don’t feel tempted to quit reading after the first couple of sentences. You can also start an email with the most important thing to immediately catch the subscribers’ attention.
Enable social media sharing
Did you know that emails enabling social media sharing have 30% more clicks than the ones that don’t do that? Furthermore, emails with 3 or more social media sharing options (be it buttons, the ability to share email’s content on social media, etc.) have up to 55% more clicks.
Why does it happen? The answer is simple: even if a subscriber isn’t personally interested in your offer, they might still think that it will be useful for their friends on social media. Therefore, grant them these social media sharing opportunities.
Segment your database
Segmentation helps increase the percentage of clicks in two simple ways. First, using it ensures that you won’t be bothering your subscribers with irrelevant offers. Second, it helps you understand which offers truly interest a certain segment of your database.
According to the studies, using segmented databases in your email marketing strategy allows you to obtain 18% more transactions as well as increase both sales and income up to 24%.
Segment your content
Segmentation is important for content as well. Once you know who you are targeting, think about offering something valuable to them. Carrying this out in your email marketing strategy will increase your chances of capturing the attention of your audience.
Personalize your emails
With the help of marketing automation software you can personalize emails in so many ways. Addressing a subscriber by their name is already enough to improve CTR a bit; however, now you can do more than just that. Just think of the ways you can use all the information you have about the client: their purchase and download history, website activity, location, age, date of birth, etc.
Eliminate all distractions
Just like landing pages, emails should be free of items that could distract the subscribers. Therefore, try to center one email around one idea only and avoid including unnecessary graphic elements, navigation menus, etc. Make sure that the purpose of an email is easily and instantly understood and that nothing distracts a recipient from that main purpose.
Add a postscript
The postscript is a very effective way to reiterate an offer. It clearly stands out among the rest of the email’s content and therefore could drive the recipients’ attention. Even if a recipient doesn’t read all email, they might still pay attention to the postscript.
Create a sense of urgency
‘Act now’, ‘The offer expires in 2 hours’, etc. Such messages might sound cliche; however, they are effective nevertheless. It turns out that the users are more motivated to open an email when they see it is available only for a limited time.
Make emails responsive
Many users view emails from mobile devices these days. Therefore, you need to make sure that the emails will look good not only on PCs and laptops but on tablets and smartphones as well. Make the design of your emails responsive and see for yourself how it affects CTR.
5 Best Practices for Link Optimization
If you want to improve your CTR, you should make the links a key element of your email marketing strategy. After all, they should encourage the users to click on them.
How can you make the links appealing to the subscribers? Here are 5 tips on that.
Make them easy to see
If a link is an important part of an email, it should look accordingly. One of the easiest ways to make the links stand out and be easy to spot from the first glance is by formatting them. You can make them bold, underline them, assign them a color that would help them stand out from the rest of the text, etc.
Avoid putting links in the middle of a very long paragraph. Instead, try to add them to a small paragraph that stands out on its own.
Mind the positioning
At least one of the links should be placed in the top part of an email, so the users won’t have to scroll down to spot it. Doing so will help you ensure that the links won’t go unnoticed.
Do not use images as links
Though it may be interesting to make images clickable or to create clickable call-to-action buttons occasionally, it’s better to save this technique for web pages. The email images don’t always upload well and in this case, both the link and an opportunity to increase your CTR will disappear.
Find the appropriate link density
You need to include a number of links in your email if you want to increase the percentage of clicks. However, if you add too many links, your email could easily end in the Spam folder.
It might take some time before you find the perfect link density for your emails. Don’t forget to run tests and to check out the statistics: it will quicken the process.
Optimize link texts and CTAs
You need to keep it simple yet make both the link texts and the CTAs relevant to the target audience. Remember: segmentation is the key to your success. Therefore, try to come up with different texts and CTAs for different segments of your target audience
Photo by Hoster on Unsplash
