The whole reason that we do email marketing is to promote our business and ultimately sell our products and services, in order to do this, we need clicks.
Email marketing lives and dies by clicks, reads are great, but what really matters is clicks. In this article, we are going to share the twelve golden rules for converting reads into clicks
- Domain verification
In order to get more clicks, the journey starts with getting emails into inboxes, not junk folders. Domain verification plays a huge part in this. If you are using email marketing software to send your email marketing campaigns, then your company domain name will need to be verified.
This is very easy to do, it involves cutting and pasting two pieces of information into the settings for your domain name. Doing this adds a seal of authenticity to your campaigns and helps to pass spam filtering. - Optin statement
In order to feel comfortable clicking on the links contained within your email marketing, your recipients need to feel safe to do so. Reminding them of why you are contacting them plays a large part in this.
Often, people may not remember opting in to receive your email, if they then think that your email could be unsolicited, then they won’t click on any links as they may not trust them.
If you add a small statement at the very top of your email marketing, reminding people of how they opted in, this really helps just to jog people’s memory - Clear call to action
The call to action is where so many email marketing campaigns go wrong, this is what prompts your viewers to click. Once you’ve jumped the first hurdle of getting decent reads, your call to action is what drives people on to click.
The common mistakes here are having the CTA too far down the page, or it’s confusing or not clear that you are asking for a click. The golden rules here are keep it simple, keep it clear and make sure people can see it without having to scroll down the page. - A/B test your campaigns
A/B testing is your best friend, it takes the mystery out of how your viewers will interact with your campaign. No matter how experienced we are, or however well enough we think we know our demographic – your audience will always surprise you.
This is why you should always A/B test different campaign variants, subject headers, send times or ‘Call to Action’ to a small sample of your email marketing list, prior to sending out the whole campaign. You can then view the results and you will then have a clear idea of what to send and when to send it.
Getting this right maximises the opportunities for your viewers to click on your email marketing links.
- Share your campaign via social media
This is a great way to hugely boost visibility, if more people can see your campaign, hopefully, more of them will then convert into clicks. Your email marketing software will automatically create a web-based sharable version of your email marketing campaign.
With this link, you can then post a copy of your campaign to your social media feeds. This is a quick and easy way to hugely boost the visibility of your campaigns. - Qualify your email addresses
In order to maximise clicks, you need to make sure that the email address that you have on file is the right one for the decision maker or principal contact. It’s all too common for email marketing campaigns to not convert to clicks because the list is mainly full of generic info@ or contact@ email addresses. These email addresses are highly unlikely to get through to the right person.
It’s a hugely worthwhile exercise to go through your email marketing list and make sure that your info is both up-to-date and correct.
- Keep your lists well maintained
A great well-maintained list is the cornerstone to successful email marketing. Over time, lists can deteriorate, as contact details change or domain names expire, this means that email addresses can become invalid.
If you see your bounce rate starting to creep up, then this means that your list could do with a good clean. If bounces creep up, then clicks will decrease, as higher bounces cause delivery issues for everything else. - Personalise your sends
Personalisation is a surefire way to increase the number of clicks that your campaigns receive. If you take the time to address each recipient personally, by using their name or company details inside your email, then this really helps to make your recipients feel valued.
This means that they then are much more likely to convert into a click. - Optimise your design for all devices
The mistake lots of us make is not checking our design for consistency across all devices.
It’s all too common to view an email on your mobile device and find that the button to click to visit your website is either too small or too far down the page.
If people can’t see your button or link, they can’t click on it. So many great-looking email campaigns suffer from this one - Segment your data
The real secret of email marketing is being able to send the right email to the right people at the right time. This is where data segmentation will massively aid this, by working with A/B testing and looking at your analytics, you can start to identify trends and groups of people who respond similarly.
Armed with this knowledge, you can split your list into segments based on previous behaviour patterns. Doing this is well worthwhile, you’ll see a significant boost in the number of clicks that your campaigns receive. - Take time to build trust
When we send out our email marketing campaigns, the temptation is to go straight in with our best sales offer. If you are sending to people who have only recently opted in, you’ll need to build trust first. Your recipients often need to be familiar with your emails before they will convert into clicks.
A good way to do this is to send out a series of introductory emails that are more service and information based, rather than actually selling anything. Taking the time to do this really helps to build that all-important trust factor - Resent to non-openers
A lot of people often neglect this one – but it can be a really easy win. The key here is not to overdo it though. Using your email marketing software, you can segment a list of all of the people who received your email, but did not read it.
If people didn’t read your email, it could be just a case of timing – perhaps also try sending to these people at a different time. Doing this exercise will definitely boost your clicks.
Hope there are plenty of great ideas to try to boost your clicks. Employing just a few of these, to begin with, should really make a large difference to your interactions and ultimately your email marketing clicks.
