How to Improve Your Email Click-Through Rates
Like any other form of marketing, it is extremely important to set goals for your email marketing efforts. Email open rates (the percentage of email recipients that open your email) have always been a prime measurement of email marketing success, although they are becoming increasingly unreliable. In 2021, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature was released, making it possible for many of your email recipients to hide whether they actually opened your email. This left many email marketers looking to click-through rates to measure the success of their email efforts.
What are Click-Through Rates?
Unlike open rates, click-through rates are a great indicator of interest from your email recipients. Click-through rates compare the number of people who clicked a link within the email against the number of emails that were successfully delivered. Although the unreliability of open rates is unfortunate, we find click-through rates to be a much more effective indicator of an email that your recipients found engaging.
So… What is a Good Click-Through Rate?
The overall average email click-through rate is around 1.3%. For the travel & tourism industry, the average click-through rate is about 1%. I know this measurement isn’t as pleasing to the eye as a 40% open rate, but it will give you a well-rounded picture of how your emails are being received and a great place to start when you’re looking to improve!
How to Improve Your Click-Through Rate
Getting people to open your newsletter:
Even if we’re not using open rate as our primary measurement of email marketing success anymore, you still need people to open your newsletter before worrying about what they are clicking on. You could accomplish this by creating fun, intriguing subject lines that stand out. Read our blog on using ChatGPT to craft the perfect subject line.
Make sure you’re reaching the right audience:
It is important to keep your email lists clean to ensure that the people viewing your newsletter, are interested in it. By cleaning out old contacts that don’t engage with your content anymore, you can ensure you’re reaching your ideal customer base. Check out our blog on why and how to cleanse your email list.
Clear CTAs:
Rather than just hoping your email recipients will click on your headers, images, buttons, etc… tell them to. Directional language is so effective in email marketing and lucky for us, it is very simple to do! As your writing your email copy, simply add a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of every text block. An example of a good CTA is: “Click the button below to browse our upcoming events!”
Keep it brief:
Less is more with email copy. Most of your audience will be opening your emails on their phone, so if you’re writing paragraphs for each content block, recipients are going to have a hard time even seeing your CTAs. A good rule of thumb that we like to mention when delivering an Email Marketing Strategy, is when previewing your email on mobile, make sure there is at least one clickable piece of content on each scroll.
Include links…. Everywhere:
When in doubt, link it out! When looking at our email click maps, it is mind-blowing to see what people are clicking on. While many people will read your CTAs and click the buttons you tell them to, others will click intriguing headers and images before even getting to your text blocks. So, our advice is to add links anywhere and everywhere that it makes sense.
Check out this example where every arrow points to a content block that contains a link.
Make it mobile-friendly:
The last tip we will throw at you today for improving your email’s click-through rates is making them mobile-friendly! This is extremely important as the vast majority of your audience is likely opening and engaging with your emails on mobile.
Be sure to preview your emails on mobile before sending them and adjust your templates to make them easier to read on mobile devices. Things to look out for are buttons, images, and header texts that are too large, slow down loading times, or get cut off your screen when viewing on mobile.
Whether you’ve been in the email marketing scene for a while, or are brand new and starting from scratch, the TwoSix Digital team is here to help you with all things email! If you have any questions about improving your click-through rates, or your email marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to contact us!
