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Many brands and marketers alike know about open rates as a metric for email marketing success. After all, in order to know what you’re saying, consumers have to open the email, and that’s an important indicator of one level of success when it comes to a given campaign. Click-through rates are also very commonly known, but the ways to improve a campaign’s click-through rate aren’t nearly as obvious as the open rate. Site Impact knows that even if someone’s getting your message, it’s not much help if they’re not acting on it; so today we’re going to look at some basic troubleshooting tactics to take when you’re looking to boost a mediocre or poor click-through rate on a campaign.
One of the biggest areas in which email creatives--and by extension campaigns--fall short is in formatting. The best message in the world won’t get through if the people you’re sending it to can’t read it, or if reading it is a chore. Most people spend less than a minute reading an individual email, especially from marketers; if a message takes much longer than that to load or to read, you’ve lost then before it even gets to that point. There are a few key ways to troubleshoot your formatting:
â— Make sure it’s mobile-optimized
â—‹ More recipients read email on mobile devices rather than desktop; optimizing for mobile or incorporating responsive design coding to match the format to the device being used is an industry-wide best practice that marketers can’t afford to put off any longer.
â— Avoid hiding key information in images
â—‹ For one thing, putting information in images makes it harder for those with different accessibility needs to be able to read the information. For another, many people disable images in their email--so embedding information in those images means these recipients will be missing vital details.
â— Check width and length.
â—‹ This seems basic, but test-sending across devices to check that nobody will have to scroll much either horizontally or vertically makes a very big difference.
â— Make it scannable
â—‹ As mentioned before: people spend less than a minute, on average, reading a given email. If your key message can come across in twenty seconds, you’re much more likely to reel a recipient in than if you force them to read an entire paragraph to understand what you’re offering.
As the email marketing industry grows, consumers are receiving more and more emails every year; with that comes the opportunistic spammers and scammers, and with the scammers come increased oversight from email providers like Google and Yahoo. Looking out for consumers’ interests, most email providers have some form of spam filter in place to move incoming emails that recipients are less likely to be interested in away from the inbox, to be safely contained. Adding to this effort, consumers themselves can consign emails to spam, impacting the reputation of the sender and ensuring that those same consumers can safely ignore any future emails from the brand. Keeping your reputation squeaky-clean as a sender will mean not only that the emails will get where you want them to be, but also that your messages will be more likely to be trusted. Greater confidence means more clicks.
These are just two of the steps you can take to improve your click-through rates; of course, there are a lot more options available to you from this point, but from what we’ve seen at Site Impact, these two aspects are both in the highest categories of importance. Contact us to find out more ways to make small changes to your email campaigns and get big improvements in your click-through rate.
