Email marketing is a proven marketing tool for businesses large and small. It is a great way to engage with clients and prospects and a vital part of the marketing mix to maintain brand awareness for your business. Email marketing performance is initially measured in two ways: open rate and click rate. This article looks at key ways to maximise your click rate from your email marketing.
The right people
A big list of contacts in your email marketing tool means only one thing: A big bill each month. You want the people on your mailing list to be interacting with your marketing communication, so keeping it clean and ensuring people really want to be on your list is good. A smaller list of engaged contacts is always going to be better for your business than a long list that is just names and email addresses.
Targeted content
If your email campaigns aren’t providing content that your contacts want to read, they are never going to click through. The written content within your email needs to give them a great reason to click through.
Two suggestions to help you get the right content:
- Look at what you’ve published before. What topics have engaged people and seen plenty of page views?
- Ask your clients and your target audience what keeps them awake at night, or what they want help with.
Improve your open rate
Nobody can click if they haven’t opened the email campaign in the first place. Open rates are impacted by two things:
- Who the email is from. Make sure there is a name in there as well, rather than simply a company name. People buy from people (more about that here) and they open emails from brands they know and trust.
- The quality of the subject line. Entice people into opening your email through urgency, or appealing to their vanity, greed or other needs. There’s a great list of examples here.
A low open rate guarantees a low click rate, so you need more opens to maximise your click rate.
Make it easy to click
Buttons are a great way to make it obvious what you want people to do. Colouring them so they stand out (within your company brand guidelines of course) is key, but there are two other places for links that you may not have considered
- Within the text. Hyperlinks in the text, especially in the first line or two, can increase click rates by 30-40%. They are particularly helpful if people don’t download images (buttons are often images).
- Within images. Adding a link to an image makes it into another big button. Whether people are scrolling on their phone (images are always bigger than buttons) or running their mouse across the screen, adding a link to each image is a great way to grab a few more clicks.
These two quick changes can triple the number of opportunities for someone to click through. See in the image below how many more clicks were gained from adding more click opportunities
The ultimate measure of how good your email marketing is, of course, is sales generated, but if people aren’t on your website, they’re not likely to be buying. Higher click rates mean more people on your website, so maximising your click rate is a vital part of any email marketing you do.
If you need a hand, give us a call: 020 8634 5911
