By The email click-through rate, also known as CTR, is the ratio of readers who click on a particular link within the email to the total number of users who open the email.
What’s considered a good CTR?
The average CTR across all sectors is a surprisingly low 3.42%. So, if your CTR is similar to that figure, your emails are actually pretty successful!
But there’s always room for improvement. Regardless of whether your CTR is similar to the average figure or much lower, consistently working to improve upon your current statistics is imperative to ensuring your email marketing strategy is as effective as it can possibly be.
Below, you’ll find 5 key techniques that will not only improve your email click-through rates, but your entire email campaign—and will likely increase conversion rates too. So, if increasing your CTR is something you’re keen to achieve, keep reading.
1. Responsive Design
Do you design your email campaigns without even considering mobile engagement? If so, you need to completely re-think your strategy. Back in 2015, a huge 68% of emails were opened on mobile devices. And now we’re two years down the line, that figure is almost certain to have increased.
What comes across well on a desktop may not translate the same on a mobile device. Certain images may be completely the wrong size or simply won’t load at all, and text formatting could be similarly awry.
Due to the sheer number of mobile devices used on a daily basis to check emails, it’s essential you take this into account when both designing and constructing your email content to give your emails the best possible chance of generating a high CTR.
2. Boost Your Call to Action
Your call to action (CTA) is undoubtedly the most important aspect of virtually any marketing email. Without it, your audience simply won’t know what you want them to do.
Using a bright, eye-catching button as your CTA mechanism is often a great starting point, simply because it will be virtually unmissable to the reader. Ensuring it’s centrally-placed within the email will do a great job at catching the user’s eye.
Keeping your message clear, concise and free of unnecessary jargon is essential too—after all, people are busy and don’t want to waste time reading anything that’s not 100% relevant.
3. Increase Urgency
Increasing urgency is a sure-fire method of encouraging your audience to take action, thereby increasing your CTR.
Using words such as ‘now’ and ‘today’ will effortlessly do this and, to further increase urgency effectiveness, placing a limited time frame on when readers are able to access the product/service you’re offering is almost guaranteed to speed things up.
Using a bold countdown timer will be incredibly useful, as it immediately signals to your email audience that time is precious and that they must act quickly—resulting in them being able to get their hands on what they want, and an increased CTR and sales for you!
4. Only Send Emails of Relevance and Value
As we’ve mentioned, busy people simply don’t want to spend their time reading something that’s not relevant or valuable—even using a mobile device.
Sending a load of emails without any real substance will not only result in an almost zero chance of achieving a high CTR, but may also deter your audience from opening your emails ever again. Typically, 75% of marketers send 1-5 emails a month, and this seems to work well.
The live social feed tool by NiftyImages is a great way to get the ball rolling with this, consistently adding up-to-date content to your emails each time they’re opened.
5. Personalization
Say you receive two emails: the first one personalized with your name, the second without. Which one are you most likely to engage with? Obviously the first.
Personalizing your emails simply makes your audience feel unique, almost giving the illusion you’ve specifically created that email for their eyes only, directly speaking to them.
Immediately increasing feelings of trust and loyalty, personalized emails are estimated to increase CTR by 14% – definitely worth taking the time to do!
Using personalized images within the actual body of the email is a great way of doing this, simply because the images will naturally be bold and interesting to look at, further enhanced for each specific user by personalization.
Guaranteed to attract attention and encourage your audience to engage, the personalized image tool by NiftyImages does all the hard work for you, creating bespoke images with a wide range of templates for you to choose from.
Increasing your CTR may seem like a daunting task, but it’s really not that hard once you know how to do it. By implementing the above techniques into your own email campaigns, you’ll be setting yourself up for a natural increase in audience click-throughs, which may even increase overall conversion rates too!