The not so standard email click-through rate advice.

Having read and researched the different ways you can improve email click-through rates, it seems as though it would be hard not to achieve an increase.  However, it’s something that many organisations still grapple with and are constantly looking to improve but the advice out there quite often seems repetitive and ticks the boxes of all the things you’re already doing.  So let’s explore some of the more alternative less ‘run-of-the-mill’ ideas and tips for cranking up the click-throughs of your emails.

It’s all in the mind.

As with all human behaviour there is a complex psychological chemistry at work.  By simply tweaking your content to ensure that the wording used is positive and enlightening can increase the engagement and click-through, in some cases it’s even been raised by as much as 22% (Beashel, 2014a).

Beashel (2014b) also argues for the power of intrigue and curiosity within emails.  Tempting the reader with snippets of information which leaves them just having to know more – these are often found on banner ads too, or sites such as Buzzfeed, whereby you’re left thinking that your life just simply couldn’t go on without this juicy piece of “life changing” info.

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Of course, not all organisations will be able to be quite as creative as the examples above, but with a little consideration for the target market’s tastes and preferences this could be useful in encouraging them to click-through to your site from your email. The trick is to make them feel like they’re missing out if they don’t click to find out more (Beashel, 2014b).  For example Jo Malone could intrigue the consumer with “One of our candles was talk of the town amongst star guests and models during its appearance at London Fashion Week” with a link to the candle page in question.  This level of tailoring to the consumer is also important to avoid them becoming suspicious of the email, if the content seems obscure to what would normally be sent the chances are the consumer will delete the email and possibly unsubscribe (Brown et al, 2008).

Short and sweet, keep it neat.

No one has time to read through reems of content and if they did have time they still probably wouldn’t want to be reading an essay of marketing messages tailored to the masses.  So keep it to the point and make it easy on the eye – not only aesthetically but in font size and the colours used in the email.  Make the call to action as clear as possible and if it’s necessary use buttons like these to make it even easier for the reader to engage (Paquet, 2014):

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It’s not all rose tinted filters.

Although many of us love filtering our images for Instagram, the same cannot be said of email filters from a digital marketers’ perspective.  Yes they’re crucial for keeping us safe and virus free, zapping all the suspicious and malicious emails straight into the junk folder, but do remember that many inboxes have security measures in place to filter out our perfectly legitimate emails too.  If you’re using emails or subject headings with symbols “@” ”%” and/or key words such as “Free” “Buy” and “Percent” you run the risk of your email being rejected straight to the bin before it’s even hit the email inbox.  Avoid the risk of your perfect email being tripped at the last hurdle and remove the filter danger words (Wix, 2014).

Montezuma Chocolate seem to have executed all of these elements impeccably with their email below:

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There’s a positive, light hearted feel to the content, it’s friendly and engaging with phrases such as “Time to grab yourself a chocolate bargain!”.  The email teases the consumer with snippets of information but encourages a click through to see just what is on offer. Plus there are no suspicious words to be tripped up by the email filters.

So there it is the not so obvious points to consider when attempting to increase your email click-through rate.  Good luck!

 

References

Beashel, A. (2014a) How to increase your email click-through rate by 22% using positivity. [Online] <https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/4346/positivity-email-click-through-rate> [accessed 11th April 2015].

Beashel, A. (2014b) 3 psychology-backed ways to improve your email click-through rate. [Online] <https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/4251/improve-email-click-through-rate-psychology> [accessed 11th April 2015].

Brown, G., Howe, T., Ihbe, M., Prakash, A. and Borders, K. (2008) Social Networks and Context-Aware Spam. Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer supported cooperative work.

Paquet, M. (2014) 7 Things You Can Do to Significantly Improve Your Email Click-Through Rates [Online] <http://blogs.constantcontact.com/click-through-rate/#> [accessed 11th April 2015].

Wix (2014) 5 Tips for Improving your Email Click-Through Rate. [Online] <http://www.wix.com/blog/2014/08/5-tips-for-improving-your-email-click-through-rate/> [accessed 11th April 2015].

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