How To Increase Your E-mail Click-Through Rates Today

Here we look at 4 steps to help increase your click-through-rates (CTR) and get your marketing campaign back on track

Email marketing is fast becoming the go-to tool for businesses around the globe but how effective is it and how can you increase the percentage of people clicking through to your target marketing.

We all want people to open messages, so creating catchy subject lines is a good start but that’s just the first step, now you must master the art of directing them through clicks to the heart of your marketing campaign.

Industry average figures are1.91% for a search ad, and 0.35% for a display ad.So let us consider that for every 100 emails you barely have anyone in the ring to fight with.

The classic misconception of many companies is seeing people opening emails and believing that their marketing strategy is on the right track; however the goal is to direct them to your target link.

Failure to-do-so will result in little or no ROI, and a complete overhaul of marketing strategy and re-allocation of your marketing budget is suddenly on the table at the next board meeting.

Here we look at 4 ways to enhance your click-through-rates and get value for money on your budget and ROI.

Segmenting your Users

Let us start with considering levels of importance.

Segmenting your lists is at the pinnacle of importance, identifying your niche and ensuring your serving this particular group of people is vital.

When business owners try to divide groups of people into subgroups things can become confused. Take business owners, for example; there are business owners at several stages of their business evolution:

• Start-up business owners
• Small business owners – less than $250,000 per year
• Small to medium-sized business owners $250,000 – $1,000,000 per year
• Establish business owners $1,000,000 per year, plus
• These are a diverse range of subgroups. All of whom may subscribe to your mailing list.

Each one will have a specific and differing reason for taking an interest in your product or services. So it is imperative to supply them with the information and messages that apply to them. Almost an impossible task unless you can segment them.

Segmentation gives you the ability to target their circumstances and goals. Naturally, this will help increase your CTR as your information is relevant.

Let us pick a topic which is growing in popularity around the world right now and relatable to you as a reader; health, weight-loss and exercise. I have recently subscribed to a website offering advice covering all of those subjects, however I am a constant traveller and so try to find time to find a gym as often as I possibly can to train while on the move from city to city but am not so concerned with health or weight-loss.

The particular website in question has a section dedicated to weight training. Currently, around about one-in-six of every emails I receive focuses on weight-training and gym exercise. These are the only emails from this website that I open and click.  Now, if the company were to segment me based upon my usage trends, it would become apparent what information and topics I gravitate toward, and as a direct result their CTR would increase considerably, make sense?

There are numerous ways in which to segment your list.

When I mention surveys, many of you will groan as so many are boring and repetitive, as you will no doubt experience on almost a daily basis, but they can be effective if structured based upon usage trends.  If targeted correctly they can be interactive, engaging that correlates to a high ratio of keeping your users on-site.

Opt-in Survey

These can be effective as they produce what we call micro commitments.

Information is Key

If you choose the route of surveys, be sure to engage and ask subscribers questions to process and filter the answers. If running a fitness website, look for what goals they are looking to achieve:

• Weight Loss
• Weight Maintenance
• Strength Building
• Body Toning
• Body Building

Dependant on the answers is where your linkage comes into play to know where to direct them to the products and information that could lead to a potential sale or to where your sponsors want people to be looking.

It’s proven with surveys not to ask too many questions, as overloading will lead to disinterest, not everyone has all evening to surf the net. Around 7-10 question should be sufficient to maintain interest and gather valuable data. 

Insight and Engagement

Reading engages the human brain through focused insight and relevant topic matter. In doing-so this will increase your CTR. Only in recent human history have we communicated through writing, for centuries stories were orally passed down from generation to generation.

So subject matter is critical, when we read about pain, a part of our brain triggers and reacts to pain, and the same with smell, activation points of our brain are stimulated.

If your brand or website does not lend itself to content engagement that’s not an issue but you can always engage the reader in some capacity.  The same as the surveys I mentioned above, be sure to keep it relevant. It can be about the origin of the products (consider segmentation) talk about company values and engage.

Based upon health and fitness as described above here is an example of a tried and tested framework in this area to tell a story of someone that used your website or your gym to do the following:

• The person understood they needed a change of lifestyle
• Stepped out of their comfort zone and into a gym
• Got training and advice from a mentor
• Faced and overcame personal inner battles and obstacles
• Achieved their goals and passed on this information to others

As little as 400 words will suffice which can be less than a 4-minute read but inspirational to your reader.

Multiple Calls to Action

One common marketing mistake is having only one call-to-action on either a page or an article, and placing this at the end of either. If you have not engaged your audience at the beginning, they will never make it to the end to click on your call to action.

Here are some simple solutions:

Add a call to action at the beginning, the middle and the end of your email. (It’s simple but effective) If you have engaged your audience, they may click before they even finish reading the article.

This will see an instant increase in your CTR but make sure to have alternative phrases, instead of ‘click here’ get more creative with something like ‘get the formula here’ for example. If you understand that segmentation and engagement are important, you will still see an upturn in CTR’s using this method.

Any call to action should be precise in what they stand to gain or learn by clicking, so be concise.

The gulf between ‘click here’ and ‘click here to learn how to increase your click-through-rates’ can be enormous, and the difference between success and failure.

Conclusion

There are variable metrics in measuring email marketing. The main priority is engagement and getting people to click and follow your links, without clicks your products and services are rendered as useful as your failed marketing strategy.

Segment your Audience

Engage them with relevant stories based upon their usage data and add more calls to action in appropriate places. Try this methodology; you don’t need to re-invent the wheel, just pump up your tyres a little.

Author Bio

Paula Timpson is an avid tech blogger with a love of all sports and cookery which she also writes about.  She is associated with SEO Company Canberra, a leading SEO company in Australia.