Email marketing: how to grow your click-through rate (CTR)

Every day we receive dozens (or even hundreds!) of promotional emails. Increasing the click-through rate is essential for email marketing strategies to bear fruit, but the truth is that in most cases, these emails pass through our inbox without pain or glory.

If you want to improve the CTR of your brand’s emails, you’ll need to be clever and stand out from the competition. Want to know how? Don’t miss out on these tips and best practices!

10 Tips to Grow Your Click-Through Rate

1. A/B test the subjects. To improve your CTR, the first thing you need to work on is the open rate: after all, if a user doesn’t open your email, they can’t click on the offer inside. And to achieve this, you must get their attention with a good subject. A/B testing will allow you to try different formulas until you find what really works.
2. The good, if brief, is twice as good. When composing the body of the email, don’t get involved! The more concise the email, according to Bulk Q, the easier it is for the recipient to click on the offer before getting bored and abandoning it. Another very useful trick is to start with the most important thing.
3. Includes social media sharing options. Emails that include the option to share on a social network have 30% more clicks than those that do not include any. If there are 3 or more, this percentage rises to 55%. And although your offer may not directly interest the recipient of the email, their friends will likely be interested.
4. Segment your databases. Segmentation helps increase click-through rates by avoiding annoying users with offers that are irrelevant to them and offering them what they’re interested in. According to studies, using segmented databases in your email marketing allows you to obtain 18% more transactions, 24% more sales, and 24% more revenue.
5. Segment your content. It’s a logical consequence of the previous step: once you know who you’re targeting, think about how you can offer value in a personalized way, and you’ll increase your chances of getting it right.
6. Personalize your emails. Thanks to marketing automation, you can go a step further and introduce custom variables into your emails (not just the name!). Think about how you can use all the information you have about the customer: purchase and download history, satisfaction rate, activity on your website, location, age, date of birth…
7. Eliminate distractions. As with landing pages, emails should be free of elements that could distract the recipient. Therefore, avoid including the navigation menu of your page or combining several different offers. Ideally, in terms of CTR, each email should have a single objective and be very clear from the beginning.
8. Includes a postscript. The postscript is a very useful resource to reiterate an offer. In addition, it is an element that stands out from the body of the email, so it is easier for it to end up attracting the attention of the people who read the promotional emails (that is, the majority).
9. It creates a sense of urgency. A sense of urgency is one of the oldest tricks in marketing… because it works! If your email offers are only available for a limited time, users will have more incentive to click right away.
10. Make sure your emails are fully responsive. Most users check their email from mobiles, tablets, and other devices, but you can’t forget about laptops and desktops either. In short, to achieve a good CTR, you need the design of your emails to work perfectly and be attractive on screens of all sizes.

5 Best Practices for Optimizing Your Links

If you’re looking to improve your click-through rate, links are a key element of your email marketing. After all, that’s where your users should click, right? But many times, we do not pay all the necessary attention to this detail. So that it doesn’t happen to you, take good note of these practices:

1. Appearance is important. Links should stand out at first glance and be identifiable as such. To do this, make them a different color from the rest of the text (blue is a classic) and be underlined and bold. It is also important that they do not appear in the middle of a very long paragraph, but isolated and with a little white space above and below.
2. Take care of the location. At least one of the links (and if possible, several of them) should appear at the top of the email, without the user having to scroll down to see them. This makes it harder for them to be overlooked.
3. Don’t use images as a link. Occasionally, it can be interesting to “hide” a link inside an image or a call-to-action button, but this technique works better on websites than in email marketing. The reason is that sometimes images don’t load well in emails, so the link (and the opportunity to increase your CTR) disappears.
4. Look for the right link density. To increase the click-through rate, you have to make it easy for the user. But if you overdo it by including links, you can end up in the spam folder. As always, remember that you can test until you find the optimal formula.
5. Optimize link text and calls-to-action. Try to keep it simple, as relevant as possible to the target audience (remember: segmentation is key), and answer the what, why, and how.