How to Increase Email Click-Through Rate
You’ve created your best email campaign ever. You hit send and are curious to see how many subscribers will react. Full of excitement, you check out newsletter stats the next day… only to discover that your email click-through rate is below average. This blog post contains 10 actionable tips that will help you skyrocket email click-through rates.
1. Newsletter Is Consistent With the Brand/Website
Trust factor is a big one. The best way to establish it is to make your newsletter look like your website. If your subscriber doesn’t recognize your brand upon newsletter opening, they might delete the newsletter right away, thinking it landed in their inbox by mistake. And that would obviously lower your email click-through rate.
2. Email Fits Within the Standard 600 PX Preview Width
Your email should fit within this standard width so that it will display properly. However, you don’t need to know any HTML to create a professionally looking newsletter. Many email clients, such as Newsletter2Go offer intuitive drag & drop editors that do your job for you.
3. Optimize for Mobile
Mobile usage has been on the rise and a growing number of people has been reading emails on their mobile devices. In fact, 75% of Gmail’s 900M users access their accounts via mobile devices. Therefore, you’d like to make sure your newsletter is optimized for two reasons:
- Responsive design contributes significantly towards higher email click-through rates. And if your newsletters are difficult to read on a mobile device, they will be a big turnoff for your readers.
- Your competition might have not gotten around creating newsletters for mobile – so beat them to it!
Make sure your emails are easy to read from any device. Therefore, use email templates that are mobile responsive (don’t confuse with mobile-friendly). What’s the difference?
Mobile friendly newsletters scale down to fit the size of the screen… however, they don’t adjust layouts or fonts, which means that the reading experience isn’t seamless.
In mobile responsive emails campaigns buttons, images and text automatically adjust to fit the screen size. What is also important, multi-column email layouts adjust to single columns on mobile devices. Therefore, your content is as easy to read on a touchscreen as it is with a mouse. Here you can find mobile responsive templates.
4. Place the CTA on the Right
Everyone knows a CTA is a core of the newsletter. However, not many know where to place it.
Here’s an interesting trick: place it to the right of text to boost your email click-through rates.
Ever heard of the Guttenberg diagram?
It’s used to optimize displays with a limited number of elements. The diagram divides your display into four different areas. As you can see in the image below, the primary optical area is, not surprisingly, at the top left. The strong fallow area happens to be at the top right. The bottom left marks the weak fallow area. Consequently, the terminal area at the bottom right. When your customers (or whoever else for that matter) start reading the text, their eyes would begin at the primary optical area and move across to the terminal area.
A call to action button in the terminal area will do the trick, because it’s placed right at the end of their viewing pattern. You might be compelled to place your CTA somewhere else and you surely will get some clicks, but you would have gotten more if the button was in the terminal area.
5. Segment Emails
You don’t expect your email subscribers to have similar interests, do you?
Therefore, you should segment your subscribers (for example, according to interests) and send them tailored emails. Just do it and see how your email click-through rates skyrocket. Read more about email segmentation and campaign automation.
6. Personalize Campaigns
Contact segmentation on its own might still not cut it. Increase your odds by personalizing your emails. Once your subscriber feels the newsletter was written just for them, there’s a higher chance that your email click-through rates will see an increase.
How can you personalize your emails?
- Address your subscriber with their first name.
Many companies include their reader’s name in the beginning of the newsletter, so try something different: add it in the middle or at the end.
- When creating a subscription form, ask new joiners about their interests.
That will help you personalize emails as well.
- Collect birth dates.
Once you have your readers’ birth dates, you can send them a birthday email with a special offer. You can collect your subscribers’ birth dates on your signup page or after they have signed up and send them a celebratory email on their birthday.
7. One Call to Action Suffices
Sometimes less is more. Don’t distract/overwhelm your subscribers with too many call to actions. Create one CTA and make sure it’s big and visible. If it’s action-oriented and inspires fear of missing out, it should do the trick.
Not convinced? If you don’t want to give up on many CTAs easily, pepper your newsletter with the same link and check email click-through rate afterwards.
8. Add Social Proof
It’s a great tip, especially if you are still establishing your business. Persuade subscribers to take an action by showing that other people trusted you with their wallets before.
Including social proof in your newsletter, right next to the call to action, will surely convince more readers to make a purchase.
9. Include a P.S.
Are you a serial text scanner?
Thought so.
Many people have developed the habit of text scanning to fetch the most important information. Therefore, your P.S. should stop scanners and reiterate your offer. Interestingly, most companies don’t seem to harness the power of P.S., so it’s another thing that will make your email stand out. Don’t forget to A/B test newsletters to check whether your newsletter receives a higher email click-through rate this useful addition.
10. Include Social Sharing Options
Would you like your readers to share your newsletters with family and friends?
Include social sharing buttons. These surely work well breaking down the text and make your email easier on the eye.