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Every marketing email has a goal. This goal needs to be its primary call to action. So before you write your CTA copy — or even the rest of your email — be clear on what you want your subscribers to do. Know which link you’d like them to click. This is your primary CTA (or the reason why you’re sending the email), and any others you might need to include naturally become your secondary CTAs.
If you must use multiple secondary calls to action, make sure that your email and all its elements (copy, layout, design, etc.) stay focused on the primary one, so your subscribers don’t get distracted.
Write personalized email copy
Your email click-through rate is a measure of how engaging your subscribers find your content. If you get an excellent open rate but a poor click-through rate, it’s an indicator that your message(s) didn’t connect with your subscribers.
One way to turn this around is to write personalized email copy. For example, if you cater to three segments, write three versions of your email and send each a personalized variation — that speaks to them directly.
Most email marketers (75%) believe that personalized emails perform better. And brands that personalize their emails get 27% higher click-through rates.
Action words tend to do better. So if, for example, you’re selling tickets to your annual conference, go for “Register” and not “Check out the event details.”
Including the word CLICK can also make your CTA copy more clickable: “Click here to register.”
If you’re offering a time-sensitive promotion, add urgency to your CTA copy. For instance: 25% off — today only.
Quite a few brands send image-only emails. You get to be more creative with the design with such emails, and they can also be quick to create.
But if a subscriber has turned their email client’s images off (this impacted about 43% of emails back in 2014), they’ll miss all of your email’s content — 100%. See this:
Naturally, you don’t get any clicks here unless your subscribers click the “Show images” option.
Ideally, you should balance your email content so that it makes sense even with the images turned off. The call-to-action links should be there.
Note, however, that images can boost email click-through rates as well. In its study of 5000 emails, Vero found that emails with images recorded a 42% higher CTR than emails that didn’t. So include quality images but have text as well.
You can get more clicks on your calls to action if you use buttons instead of posting them as test links. When CampaignMonitor tested placing its calls to action as buttons and not as plain text links, its email got a whopping 28% higher click-through rate. You can understand why. Chances are that you skim through your emails instead of reading them word by word — pretty much the same way you engage with web content. When you’re quickly going over an email in this way, you’re much more likely to notice a button than a text link.
Following the same insight, your CTA button must stand out. A bigger size, a bright color, and a good above-the-fold placement can impact your clicks.
Also, instead of using button images, try to code your CTA buttons. Because, again, if users have their images turned off, your CTA images won’t show up at all. Here’s an email with an HTML button that shows up even with the images turned off:
One sure way of improving your email click-through rate is to use a clean layout. If you’re a catering service and want to send your subscribers a thanksgiving offer, a clean single-column design might work well for you. In contrast, if you wanted to share the new menus you just launched or a new service range, you could try a multi-column layout that allows for sharing more information.
Here’s an email that uses a very focused single-column layout:
Other than that, short sentences (because subscribers skim!), white space, and directional cues can also help guide subscribers to your call to action. A directional prompt can be as simple as including an arrow at the end of your CTA copy: “Click here to register →”
Mobile continues to dominate the email channel, with 49.7% of email opens happening on mobile. But despite this, one in five email campaigns isn’t mobile-friendly. If your emails fit into mobiles clunkily, your click-through rate is bound to be low. So before hitting schedule or send, email yourself a test copy and view it on your mobile. Also, see if the CTAs are easily clickable and the overall email experience!
Your email send time influences your open and click-through rates too. So look for the best days and times to send your emails. Thursdays and Tuesdays are typically the best days for email marketing. Emails you send on Tuesdays get the best open and click-through rates on average. But these can vary greatly across businesses, so try a few different days and times.
The number of emails you send impacts your email click-through rate too. For eCommerce businesses, sending more than five emails can bring down the average click-through rate (and open rate as well). Review your subscribers’ preferences to know how they can be more receptive to your emails and give you more clicks.
If you’re looking for a dramatic boost in your click-through rate, try a dramatic change in your email copy, layout, or design.
One way to experiment safely is to A/B test your emails. For example, try sending two starkly different email layouts and see which one gets more clicks. You can start with email testing even if you only have about a thousand email contacts. Use what you learn from such experiments to keep improving your email click-through rate metric.
Get in touch if you’re looking for a partner to handle your email marketing. At 2Point, we help businesses just like you leverage the email channel and send campaigns that are optimized not just for getting better top-of-the-funnel metrics like open and click-through rates but also for bottom-funnel performance like sales and conversions.
We are 2Point, a digital agency, creatively driven and data inspired. We work with ambitious brands around the world, handling all their digital production needs and helping them achieve increasingly higher sales goals.
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