Is your email marketing stressing you out? It’s one of the ordinary yet trustworthy means of marketing that has shown an amazing response for both new and established ventures.
If you face a sluggish email campaign with an underwhelming click-through rate, then your stress is for the right reason. In case email subscribers don’t click your links, this will result in fewer leads and sales, which is bound to affect your income.
At times, it gets tricky for marketers to keep their clients engaged due to a shortage of ideas. The pressure to stay at the top of the competition ends up dooming the campaign. This is why, in this article, we’ll explain what is considered to be a good email click-through rate and how to improve this indicator in your campaigns if you feel it’s insufficient.
Outline:
How to calculate your email click-through rate
Of course, before considering other metrics, you need to make sure your emails are opened. About 35 percent of email recipients open emails based on a catchy subject line. Therefore, your email must stand out and gain the subscribers’ attention enough to click on it. You can find useful tips for increasing your email open rate here.
After ensuring you have a good email open rate, you should set an aim of what an average email click-through rate should be like for your campaign. This will help you understand the metric better.
To calculate email click-through rate, perform the following two steps:
- Divide the total number of recipients that clicked the link you added to your email by the number of emails delivered
- Multiply the result by 100
What is a good click-through rate for email?
For every industry and company, it’s different. Let’s take an example. Pace claims that an email marketing click-through rate over 10% is reasonable. However, many emails don’t reach a number close to that. In fact, an email click-through rate of 2.6% is considered average when calculated across all industries.
Keep your industry benchmarks in mind when setting and calculating your metrics.
Tips to increase the click-through rate of the email marketing campaign
1. Pay attention to brand uniformity
Brand consistency or uniformity is one of the first things you need to ensure. With the right usage of brand tone, keywords, and addressing the right audience, you can surely increase your email marketing campaign’s click-through rate.
Every brand has an individual personality, and it’s essential for you to keep it as much relatable with the audience as possible. Make your blogs, social media posts, newsletters, and emails look consistent with your brand and website. This way, you’ll make sure your clients always easily recognize you.
2. Be careful with email formatting
Another essential factor that can help boost the click-through rate is setting the right format for your emails. Many times, prospects leave emails unread if they find the format not easy on the eyes. Therefore, we suggest ways to fix it:
- Use a mobile-friendly format for your emails. The ratio of people reading emails on mobile devices is higher than desktop computers, so this is essential.
- Use the right width. If your emails is too wide or too narrow, it can lead to a bad impression and will eventually stop recipients from reading any further.
- Don’t hide key details in images. In case they are blocked by default, it may hurt your email accessibility. Your targeted prospect will miss out on essential information and won’t click your link.
3. Go for a social sharing option
Recently, social sharing has become a prominent feature you shouldn’t forget to use. It’s believed that you can witness an increase of 30% in your click-through rate by simply including one social sharing option. And it can go up to 55% higher with three or more social sharing options.
At times, the recipient may not need any offer, but their acquaintance might be looking for some. By giving them the social sharing option, you can attract new leads, as well as improve your metrics.
4. Segment and personalize
Do you send the same email to everyone on your email list? Well, if you do, we suggest you stop right away. As a marketer, you must understand that not all clients will be interested in all of your messages. Therefore, you must categorize emails based on their relevance to the audience. This makes segmentation one of the essential elements that help increase the email click-through rate.
Secondly, your email should be personalized to enhance the chances of link clicks. You can do so by including a pop-up form on your website that clients need to fill in. This will let you understand what interests them and what offers are the most relevant to them. The more well-fitted your email is, the better response you are supposed to get.
Don’t only focus on using the recipient’s names in subject lines and the email body. Instead, use the information you have obtained about your subscribers to customize or personalize their email marketing experience. Whatever data is stored in your existing email list — such as age, demographic, location, etc. – can be used to personalize your campaign.
You can also adjust your email marketing campaign based on the actions people take on your website or their behavior, using page-level targeting to deliver offers according to the page they’re on.
With more data available in your system, personalization, segmentation, and micro-targeting will automatically become smoother and boost your email marketing click-through rate.
5. Set the timing and frequency right
Timing is one of the essential factors in getting your emails clicked frequently. If your email reaches people when they don’t have time to read it and click the link, they may never get to see it. This might be surprising, but the audience is more likely to open and click links in your emails between 8 pm and midnight, no matter the location.
Another thing that holds importance for the email click-through rate is frequency. Sending too few emails can lead to people forgetting who you are. At the same time, sending too many emails can make your messages land in the Spam folder.
6. Use power words
Humans are quite emotional. Most of us like to think that the best way to control decisions is by thinking logically with arguments and facts. However, in real life, we are not as much in control as we think we are. Neither are customers, and this can be used to the marketers’ advantage.
You can present yourself as credible and creative, as well as make the audience excited, by adopting power words. But wait, what is a power word? Power words are words that can trigger an emotional response from the recipient. And by arousing emotions and communicating with the reader’s imagination, they can also increase the click-through rate.
There are six “marketing motivators:”
- Fear
- Exclusivity
- Greed
- Guilt
- Need for approval
- Anger
Aim to make your readers more curious and engaged by asking unusual yet interesting questions that urge them to click the link. You can also be informative and promising in tone. The words given below are to attract curiosity through the email subject line and email body. With their help, you can gradually motivate the recipient to open your email and click the link.
7. Resend your emails
In case all your efforts fail, you can send out the same email campaign again to your subscribers. This works great if you can separate the audience who didn’t click the link from those who didn’t open your email in the first place. You can then resend the email only to non-openers. There’s no point in annoying subscribers who have already clicked the email.
You can use email marketing automation tools like Snov.io to create an email drip campaign and control its workflow all by yourself. It saves time from the burden of paperwork and automates the personalized sequence of emails you wish to send to a mass audience.
8. Clean the email list often
A common rule that marketers miss out is that email lists have a natural churn rate, which is approximately 25-30% each year. It includes people:
- Who get annoyed about your emails and unsubscribe
- Who don’t wish to see your emails and send them directly to the Spam folder
- Who don’t check the email account they have subscribed with
Using some of the tips listed above, such as segmentation, personalization, or sending re-engagement emails, will surely benefit you in the long run. You can also give your audience the opt-down option to get fewer emails.
If this doesn’t work for you, then you must remove the unengaged section of subscribers from your list. This implies that the ones who remain are more willing to open your email and click the link, automatically boosting the click-through rate. Data cleansing is essential as it removes the unnecessary crowd on the email list.
Wrapping it up
Now that you know how to increase the email click-through rate, you can follow these easy ways to retain existing subscribers and make sure you always have new leads coming in. With a great email marketing campaign, you can set up your small business on the path of success. And email outreach is one of the most convenient and affordable ways to do it.
No matter how many years of experience you have in email marketing, you can never be a great marketer unless you have analyzed and learned how to use power words, segmentation, personalization, as well as mastered the art of sending emails at the right time along with innovative subject lines.
As a marketer, it’s your turn now to begin with a creative campaign. By introducing these email click-through rate hacks into your email marketing right away, you can surely attain success.
