When it comes to email marketing, there are two crucial numbers to keep track of – your open rate and your CTR or click-through rate. While your first task is to get people to actually open your email, your CTR is what really determines your results. It doesn’t help you if people read your email only to delete it. If you want people to take action on your offers, you must find ways to increase your CTR.
Tip 1: Create Urgency or Scarcity
This is a time honored tactic that is still useful in all kinds of marketing. If your reader procrastinates, chances are he or she is going to forget all about your offer. You want people to take action immediately, which is why you have to make it clear to them that this is a limited offer.
You can place a time limit on your offer. This should be within a fairly short period of time, no greater than 48 hours. If you give them the rest of the month to think it over, they will feel comfortable putting your email aside for now.
You can also create scarcity by saying something like, “This offer is only for the first 20 people who sign up.” This gives your reader a reason to act now rather than later.
When creating scarcity, it’s important to be specific. Saying “limited time offer” isn’t enough, as this doesn’t give people an actual deadline.
Tip 2: Make Sure the Offer is Relevant
This may seem obvious, but if you want your recipients to click on your offers they must be relevant to their needs and interests. That’s why it’s so important to have a targeted list. It’s better to have several specialized lists than one huge and broad one.
In order to make sure your offers are well targeted, you have to be careful how you build your email list. Are you, for example, appealing to freebie seekers and then trying to sell them high cost products? You want to populate your list with people who are ideal prospects for your offers.
No matter how compelling your offer is, people aren’t going to be motivated to click through on it if it doesn’t speak to their immediate concerns.
Tip 3: Have a Strong Call to Action
This is crucial to any successful email campaign. If your email is long and meandering, with the call to action buried somewhere in the middle, chances are your “click through rate” will be dismal.
A short email that has a clear call to action is one solution. Another is to have your call to action repeated a couple of times in the message. It should also be bold and large to make sure no one misses it.
Most importantly, the call to action should be compelling. It has to be something that appeals to the reader’s interests and needs, not yours. Remember, they aren’t interested in buying your products, watching your videos or reading your eBook – unless there’s some clear benefit to doing so.
In some cases it works best to make it a teaser and not reveal too much. For example, if it’s a marketing product, you could say, “Find out how I made $750 in just 4 hours,” rather than revealing exactly what the product or system is!
Tip 4: Make Sure Your Emails are optimized for Mobile Devices
More and more people are accessing their email from smart phones and other mobile devices. If your messages can only be viewed properly on a computer, you will be losing lots of potential customers. Chances are, if a message is too hard to read, the person will either delete it or postpone reading it (which usually means they will never read it).
In the future, mobile devices are only going to get more popular. That’s why it’s critical that you make sure your emails are mobile optimized.
Tip 5: Always Test and Track
The more testing you do, the more you can find out what does and doesn’t work. Test subject lines, email lengths, styles of writing and every factor you can think of. You also must a tool such as Google Analytics so that you can track your results.
The results you get from email marketing can also change quite quickly. Your CTR might be good for a certain message and then suddenly drop off. This could be for a number of reasons. Perhaps a new and better product has been introduced. Or you suddenly have several competitors who are sending similar emails to your subscribers. In such cases, you will have to change your approach.
Sometimes making even small changes can have a big impact on your results. One word in the subject line, for example, may convince the reader that the email is worth reading.
Tip 6: Be Direct and to the Point
If your emails contain long and drawn out explanations of what you’re offering, you may be harming your CTR. Most people get tons of promotional emails each day, and don’t want to spend a lot of time studying each one. Your email can be more than one or two lines, but keep it as brief as possible.
You can give readers the details once they’ve shown enough interest to click through to your sales page.
Improving your Email CTR
If you’re doing any type of email marketing, nothing is more important than your click through rate. Once someone has made the decision to take a close look at your offer, you are a lot closer to making the sale.
There are many factors that affect your CTR. It takes constant tweaking and experimenting to find out what works best. If your rates are low, try some of the above recommendations. Even when you get them higher, don’t stop testing new ideas as there is always room for improvement.
By Guest Author – Jasmine is a well known blogger especially in the web hosting, domain name, SEO and social media industry. She shares her web hosting experiences on her blog 100Webhosting.com. If you are looking for a great web hosting company, do check out Inmotion Hosting. For a limited time only, you get 20% off. Exclusive! You can find Jasmine on Google+.
