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?

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.

What Every Email Marketer Should Know Before Hitting “Send”

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Jodi Kaplan

You probably know about how email marketing can lead to big profits. It’s cheap to use, targeted, and easy to do. Just type in your message and hit send. Right? Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Before you start, there are four email marketing tips you should know about that can drastically affect the results you get.

1. Deliverability

This is the percentage of people on the list who actually received your email. If nobody gets your email, they won’t open it, read it, or buy anything.

Why email bounces:

a bad address (just like snail mail)
an ISP with a bad reputation
spammy content (make millions, free satellite TV, weight-loss pills)

Protect yourself by using a reputable email marketing company (I recommend AWeber. Use this link to sign up, and I’ll get some milkshake money) to deliver your email, cleaning your list regularly, and checking your content for content that can trigger a trip to the spam folder. Use double opt-in (asking first for the email address and then for verification) to stop spammers.

2. Open rate

This is the number of people who open the email you sent. You can increase this by:

using a from field from a real person (your name or company name), rather than something spammy (Acai Weight Loss Marketing)
writing a great headline that promises value and solutions to problems
make the first few sentences worth reading, since many people read email with a preview pane

3. Click through rate

This is the number of people who click through to the Web site with the rest of the sales pitch and the ordering information. Click through is affected by:

copy – building up the benefits, what people will get from your product, how you solve a problem
the offer – what they actually get when they click, such as a free report, details about a conference, or a video
formatting – whether the paragraphs are long or short, if you used bullets, where the line breaks are

4. Conversion rate

The number (or percentage) of actual sales, leads, or opt-ins generated by the email. Remember to use a landing page, not your home page, to make the rest of the sale. The email “pre-sells’ the offer: why you’re sending it, what you’re offering, what it will do for them, why they need to click now, what they should do once they get to the landing page.

5. Be human

Put a human, personal face (like your own, or the person who handles the account) on your messages. Include a name, photograph and contact information. Your customers will feel as if you’re talking directly to them. If you have a sales staff, they’ll feel more connected to “their” subscribers. It’s more personal, it creates a connection, and it establishes accountability.

Tomorrow, how to boost your email conversion rates and get more sales.

Photo: wikimedia