Boost Your Email Click-Through Rate with 4 Simple Actions

Already tried a plenty of methods to improve your email CTR, but still wish it was higher? Apply these 4 little changes and drive more customers to your website.

4 Surprising Methods to Rocket Your Email CTR Sky-High

Lead generation resembles fishing a lot. Novice fishermen think that all they need to get a rich haul is to pick up their gear and go fishing. How discouraging it is when they come back home empty-handed. Novice marketers feel almost the same when they send their first bunch of the hastily written emails and get a click-through rate close to 0%.

Experienced anglers know: fish will never jump in the boat on its own. For a rich haul, you need to use not a random gear, but the particular gear intended for the particular fish. The same applies to time, place, and bait: only the right match of all factors brings the best result. Do you get where are we going with this? To succeed in both fishing and lead generation you should be an expert in your target’s behavior, understand types of your “gear” and be attentive to details.

Details. This is what email marketers often forget about and continue wondering why their CTR is not as high as they expected. You may use time-proven marketing techniques, but neglect some little things that can both tarnish your email or rocket it sky-high. Let’s consider 4 not-so-obvious but very easy ways to boost the effectiveness of your emails even more.

1. Include a Customer’s Testimonial

People don’t trust brands, they trust other people. No matter how compelling your ad is, your smart prospects understand: the company will always praise its own product regardless of its value. Real customers will praise the product only if they really like it. Any proofs? According to Social Fresh, the effectiveness rate of testimonials is 89% — this is the best result among other content marketing methods.

So how to make your prospect click? A personalized email with relevant content + a user’s testimonial from an independent source = a double-kill combination. First, you hook the prospect with something what’s in their area of interest — personalization alone improves CTR by 14%. Next, you anticipate their reasonable ”Is this product good enough to pay for it?” question by providing a screenshot or a link to testimonial left on a service like Angie’s List, Yelp, Trustpilot, or similar.

Mailforge tip: Don’t use testimonials published on your website as a proof. People trust them less because they can be fake and written by copywriters, not real customers. To find out which review performs better, you can run A/B testing using email marketing software and choose the best option.

2. Add Social Media Sharing Options

The connection between email and social media is not very clear, so a lot of marketers have no idea how links to social media may improve their CTR. In fact, they are missing a huge opportunity. The “Email Marketing and Social Media Integration Report” compiled by GetResponse says that an email with at least one social media sharing option generates a 30% higher CTR than an email with no sharing options at all. And if you add 3 or more options to your email, your CTR gets an incredible rise of 55%.

We know this sounds too good, but that’s true. And there is a pretty simple explanation why social media links are so effective. Let’s go over it using an example.

Imagine you are keen on music. One day you receive a personalized newsletter dedicated to new high-end headphones. You find them truly amazing, but don’t need to buy them right now — yours are still working good. Anyway, you find this newsletter interesting and decide to share it on Facebook. The sharing button is right here, so you just press on it. Assuming you have only 10 friends on Facebook, the company gains a 10x better chance that somebody will click and buy. And what if you had 100 friends? 1000 friends? A crowd of followers on other platforms? Draw your own conclusions.

3. Place the CTA Button on the Right

Your CTA is perfectly written, the button is well-designed, but it doesn’t deliver the desired results. What’s wrong? There is one more little detail that kills your conversion rates — wrong location. To remedy the situation, place it on the right side of your email’s template.

Why right works better than left? We read the text from left to right, so when we finish reading the email, we will find ourselves staring at the lower right corner of the page. However, if the message is too short, it’s better to place it in the upper right corner.

Mailforge tip: Since 55% of emails have been opened on mobile devices, the prospect may not see your CTA button if you email is not mobile responsive. To make sure your button looks great on any device, you can use our campaign preview feature.

4. Schedule Your Emails

Did you know that the highest email open rates occur early in the morning or early in the evening? Whereas an open rate and click-through rate are different metrics, sending emails at the right moment certainly can’t hurt your CTR, only increase.

Even if an email sent at the wrong moment is opened, a prospect may have no time to look over it. That’s why you need to choose the appropriate time when your audience will be willing and able to read it attentively. But what to do if this appropriate time does not coincide with your working hours?

That’s not an issue. You can save a lot of time and effort by using email marketing automation. Human brain power is still essential, but routine tasks are the part where software works faster. Email scheduling is one of them: instead of launching your campaign now, you can postpone it in one click using Mailforge. Customers love brands that bear in mind their time preferences.

We are sure that these recommendations will help companies improve their results. But there is still room for growth: a CTR will never be high enough until it rises to 100% and your business won’t be successful enough until it becomes the #1 in its niche. If you need more email marketing tips, you can always return to our cosy blog every time you go “fishing”. Or simply stay with us. Our marketing automation software is a “gear” that catches any “fish” — all you need is to supplement it with a right “bait”. Want to get that “rich haul”? Join Mailforge and let’s evolve together.