You've got to love your email click-through rates. They give you valuable insights into the minds of your customers. You can learn about what they are and aren't interested in and their level of engagement. In addition, when done right, you can prompt them to take action-visit your website, read your article, buy a product, or register for an event.
Want to get more out of your clicks? This article will give you a better understanding of what click-throughs are, how to analyze them, and what you can do to improve yours.
Click-Throughs Defined
There are two different types of click-through rates, as well as an additional click-to-open rate that you can calculate.
Unique click-throughs - Each email campaign you send has a unique click-through number and percentage that reflects how many individuals clicked on at least one link in your email. This is the rate you look at to measure the overall success of an individual campaign.
Individual click-throughs - These are the number of clicks on an individual link. The number of clicks on a link will show you what content, promotion, event, or author your subscribers are most interested in (or not).
Click-to-open rate - This is the number of unique clicks as a percentage of unique opens. Suppose your email had 1,000 recipients open it and 200 unique click-throughs. Your click-to-open rate would be 20 percent. This rate tells you how well your email motivated those who opened it to take action and is a telling statistic on the overall effectiveness of the email. Do You Have Good Click-Through Rates?
As with open rates, unique click-through rates vary by business type. Other factors that can impact rates are frequency, targeting through list segmentation, and the use of personalization. Here are a few click-through stats to consider:
B2B newsletters range from 5 to 15 percent B2C promotional emails' range from about 2 to 12 percent Lists that are segmented see rates in the 10 to 20 percent range* What You Can Do to Improve Your Clicks
How do your rates compare? If you want to see them improve, here are some tips to help.
1) Use a concise subject line
Subject lines with more than 49 characters (including spaces) show a 75 percent decrease in click-throughs**. I like to summarize my explanation of this phenomenon this way: when Frank Borman was the head of Eastern Airlines, he used to say, "We do a good job of cleaning our dining trays because if we don't, people assume we don't maintain our engines well." If you have a long, amateurish subject line, people assume the content of the email is equally amateurish.
2) Ask for the order
If you don't ask for clicks, you won't get them. Strengthen your calls to action. Does the text for your links clearly ask people to click? Typically a link has a "call-to-action" associated with it. This is an opportunity to convince the reader that what's on the other side of the click is worth their time. Make your invitation to click compelling and, most importantly, make it as obvious as possible. "Click to continue" or "click to buy" will consistently outperform links labeled "more" or "continue."
3) Make all of your images "clickable"
People love to click on images, so make sure that when they do they're sent to your website. Be sure to send them to a page that has a call to action associated with the content that was in the email.
4) Listen, learn, and react
You learn a lot about your readers from your clicks, like what information or offerings they find most compelling and what they don't care about. If you have found a topic that they are particularly interested in, drill down deeper. If a certain type of offer worked well, try it again.
5) Segment your lists
Target specific groups within your audience. If I owned a tennis store, I wouldn't send the same content to everyone. Regular customers who I had a great relationship with would enjoy a higher frequency of email and a higher number of calls to action. They'd be excited to hear about the new shoes, strings, and racquets that would improve their game and would readily accept numerous "click here to buy" links.
If I sent that same type of email to someone who had been in the store once to buy a can of balls, they may consider me a spammer. I'd be better off sending that subscriber content that was predominantly educational (an article on improving one's backhand, for example) and to send it less often until my relationship with them is stronger.
Now that you are thinking about click-throughs, go back and take a look at yours (both types) on your past two or three campaigns and ask yourself, "What can I learn?" Write down what your audience appears to be interested in and what they don't. Use this information, along with other important findings (what topics have higher open rates, the feedback you receive from surveys and interactions with customers, etc.), to create an action plan that will help you get those clicks up and reap the benefits that come from engaging your subscribers and compelling them to take action.
*EmailLabs **ReturnPath