email click-through rates
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Increasing your email click-through rates

Increasing your email click-through rate can be tricky, so we've compiled a few simple tips on how you can increase your email CTR. 

Transcript:

Test your headlines
Increasing your email click-through rate is based on increasing your email open rate, so start testing your headlines, first and foremost. AB test your headlines - that's one of the main things you can do. If you get more people opening, you're likely to get more people clicking through from your emails as well.

Don't rely on image-based links
Once we're into the email's body, that's where things start to get interesting - so you expect things like images to get a better click-through rate than text links. We rarely find that this is the case, we believe that this is because there's a high instance of blocking taking place from different email clients, which prevents images from loading, so it's really important to follow up any image-based links with text links as well.

Look at the link length
Probably most interesting from what we've seen is that longer links don't get as high a click-through rate as short links. So we found that, for instance, when we put in a blog title, we don't get as high a click-through rate as we'd expect. When we put through something like 'read' or 'watch' next to the blog title, that's where we really see the big uptick in click-through rates. So there's no hard and fast rules and we've certainly found that what we expected from longer titles didn't result in higher click-through rates at all!

Use teaser copy
Also, make sure that you're quite diverse with the kind of text that you're using: you want to make it appealing the same way that you would with the PPC or organic listing. Think about your user intent, think about what the user would want from that piece and don't always necessarily rely on the title as well, as quite a lot of good emails with subscriptions that I belong to will actually use snippets of text from within the email itself. That's really refreshing to see and it gives you a taste of the actual post that's behind it rather than just generic text.

Summary

  • test your headlines
  • experiment with different lengths of anchor text
  • make sure to link both text and images
  • don't be afraid to use some content from within the post that you're promoting and put it into emails as the hook for the link through to the website