Improving Click-Through Rate in Email Campaigns


Earlier we discussed how to increase your delivery rate and open rate for your email marketing campaign. The next question is how to get your users to click on the links in the email to land on your website.

Here are a few tips to increase your click-through rate:

Email Content
  • Keep your text short and to-the-point
  • Provide extra credibility for what you offer e.g. by explaining how many other clients are using the same service and perhaps including some well known brands.
  • Personalize your emails by using the recipient’s name and personal interests
  • Make your emails as targeted as possible. Only offer your user what you think they are interested in. Do not send the same offer to your entire database.
  • Give your user a reason to act on your email urgently (e.g. with an offer expiry date, or limited availability). 
  • Don’t give out everything in the email. Provide a catchy summary and leave the rest for the user to read on your website.
  • Ask your users to forward the email to their relevant colleagues for a B2B campaign, or to their friends and family for a B2C campaign. You can also use a social sharing tool for B2C campaigns.



Call-to-Action
  • Have prominent and clear call-to-actions. Make sure your links are visible without scrolling, they are bold and catchy, and it is obvious that they are clickable.
  • Don’t put your call-to-action inside an image. Images usually don’t load unless the user requests.
  • Tell people to where to click.
  • Have more than one link with different call-to-actions. Each user might relate to a different text more than others.
  • Have some links at the bottom of the email 


Email Look and Feel
  • Keep your emails simple. Remove unnecessary images, navigation bar and logos. 
  • If you have to have an image, keep in mind that most email clients don’t load them unless the user requests. So make sure the images have an alternate text to appear when the image hasn't loaded.
  • Test your email in all major email clients including all versions of Desktop Email Clients (MS Outlook, Apple Mail and Lotus Notes), Web-based Email Clients (Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail) as well as Mobile Email Clients (iPhone, iPad, Android, and Blackberry). You should make sure your email is rendered the way you want it and all the links are working. 
  • For testing web-based email clients, use all popular versions of major browsers (Chrome, Internet Explorer, FireFox). Most browsers get updated regularly. You should keep up-to-date on which versions are more commonly used. One easy way of doing so is to check your Google Analytics reports.


Testing and User Feedback
  • As always test different versions of your email with small portions of your list before sending to everyone.
  • If your email was opened but no one clicked on the links, try calling a few recipients and ask them what they thought about the offer. Try to understand what went wrong and learn from it.


Here’s a few interesting articles about how to increase your click-through-rate:


Labels: Click-Through Rate, Email Marketing, Successful Email Campaign