How to Increase Your Email Click Through Rate by 85%

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Jodi Kaplan

Image by Images_of_Money via Flickr

Want to increase your email click through rate? Marketing Experiments recently held a webinar with lots of great tips on how to focus your emails, get more email clicks, and boost conversions.

They did some testing and found something astonishing.

The best email not only beat the control, it clobbered it.

And, it’s a simple technique that you can easily use yourself.

A test email that beat the control by 85%!

Why did this email do so well? The test included an excerpt from a free ebook. The control had a standard headline and bullet points.

The book excerpt included a call to action inviting people to click – and keep reading. It followed a logical progression of thought and created its own mini marketing funnel: open the email, read the text, click the link, and then go to the website to download the rest of the book. The only way to get the rest of the book (and learn the rest of the tips) was to click through.

Distractions can kill your clicks

Another way to increase your email clicks is to remove distractions and keep focused. Lots of pictures, links, words, and video competing for attention can be overwhelming. Your readers won’t know where to look first. They may give up and go elsewhere.

Participants in the test submitted sample marketing emails for ‘live’ review. Many were following the “throw everything at it and see what sticks” approach to marketing. They had multiple, large headlines competing for attention. Others had no headline at all!

Some of the emails highlighted many different products on one page, but all the images led to a single page with still more products, rather than the specific item you clicked on.

If there are product images (like bicycles or cameras), then take them straight to that product page, with smaller links to related items if they want to look at something else.

The goal isn’t to spew everything you know, or that a customer might want to know, about your product. The goal is to get clicks to the landing page or your article.

(You can watch the whole webinar here.)

What do you think? Would you be interested in seeing something similar here?

How Does Your Average Click Through Rate Stack Up to Your Competitors?

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Jodi Kaplan

Image by Dominique Godbout via Flickr

Got an email list? When you send a message to that list, you probably want them to do something (comment, buy, click for more information), right?

So, the higher your average click through rate and open rate the better.

Right?

The question is, are you getting a good click-through rate? Or does it need improvement?

Are your average open and click through rates high enough?

How do they compare to your peers, or other people in your industry?

No comparison is perfect – it’s like well, apples and oranges, each industry and audience will be different.

Some companies find they get better results on weekends, others on Thursdays. In some cases, time of day is important. And, of course, you need to write a subject line that gets opened.

How does your average open rate compare?

Here are some resources to help you find out.

Email metrics report: Put out yearly by Mailer Mailer, this report tracks the results from over 900 million email messages. It’s got data by industry, list sizes, open rates, click through rates, personalization, and subject lines.

Marketing Sherpa Email Newsletter: A free newsletter with case studies (these often include screen shots, interviews, and specific statistics) on topics such as: low cost ways to build your list, simple changes that improved orders by 29%, and using Facebook to get more signups.

AWeber: AWeber will manage your list for you, and also track your open rates, click throughs, and bounces (emails that never quite made it to their destination).

With this data, you can see how well each email performs and even send a second message to subscribers who didn’t open your first email.

In fact, a recent case study in the Marketing Sherpa newsletter showed one firm got a 55% increase in sales with this strategy.

Hubspot: Webinar on demand with info on the science of email marketing: how days of the week affect average click-throughs, opt-out rates based on the day of the week and time of day, and whether recent subscribers are more likely to click than older ones.

Highest open rates by industry

Agriculture 25.3%
Religious 21.0%
Transportation 18.1%0%
Large Business 17.3%

Lowest average open rates (by industry)

Entertainment 9.2%
Banking 8.2%
Marketing 7.4%
Medical 7.3%

Highest average click through rates by sector

Religious 10.5%
Transportation 7.6%
Environmental 4.8%
Retail 4.5%

Lowest click through rates

Legal 0.9%
Marketing 0.8%
Entertainment 0.7%
Restaurant 0.7%

(stats from 2010 Mailer Mailer report)

Open and click through rates will vary

Your mileage will vary. Reports on average open rates and average click through rates can give you an idea of the kinds of things to look for (time of day, size of list, location, etc.), but they can’t pinpoint exactly how your audience will respond.

Test, test, test

Experiment with subject lines. Try dividing up your list (if it’s big enough) by industry or location. Test the time of day that you send your messages. Change the day of the week. Add more links. Test the response of new subscribers against longstanding readers. See what happens.

The Ridiculously Easy Way I Increased Click Through Rates by 2300%

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Jodi Kaplan

Image via Wikipedia

I talk a lot about getting inside your readers’ heads, and offering solutions to their problems, rather than yours. Sometimes, though I need to read my own advice. I was looking at one of my Squidoo lenses (which were sort of one page mini-sites) and saw that while it got traffic, the click through rates were terrible. I was trying to figure out why that was and how I could increase them.

The page was about Thomas the Tank Engine coloring pages (in honor of my nephew, who loves Thomas). I had lots of links to coloring pages for all the different characters, but none of them were converting. We got paid based on visits, clicks, sales, and other interactions with the pages, so clicks were important, even if they didn’t lead directly to selling something.

Too much friction

As I looked at it, I realized that I had all the links in a big block. There were about 20 of them, one right after the other. Sure, the page had exactly what my visitors wanted (pictures of each train character), but that big block of text was awfully intimidating. You’d have to carefully read through all those links to find the engine you were looking for. It was too hard. So, nobody clicked.

Eureka! Easy access will increase click through rates!

So, I reorganized. I divided the links into categories, by character (Thomas, James, Henry, etc.) I put a big headline on top of each one so they were easy to spot. Now all my visitors had to do was scroll down to find the right train. Clicks shot up from 1% to 24% over two days. An increase of 2300% for a few minutes work. Go look at your own pages. Would a little redecorating make a big difference? Try it and find out.