Congratulations! Your emails, equipped with pithy, punchy, expertly written subject lines, are sparking interest and getting opened anywhere from 22% to 30% of the time (depending on your industry).
Now, time for an annoying question.
Why do open rates matter? That’s simple enough; no one clicks inside your email if no one opens your email. But however important open rates are, click-through rates (CTR) are even more important.
Quick — when was the last time you opened an unsolicited business email and actually clicked? Probably only three times out of 100.
If that sounds awful, then think of it this way: Going from a 2% CTR to a 3% CTR is 50% more performance, or 50% more leads who clicked. Even small increases in this key metric are huge. Without it, nothing else in your campaign matters.
Here are some quick do’s and don’ts that can add a lot of value to your email marketing program.
Do your homework. Invest in audience segmentation.
The easiest way to improve CTR is to make sure you’re sending your emails to the specific customer segments that are most likely click on that information. And it works — customers not only open more emails from segmented campaigns, but are more than 100% more likely to click through.
Pull all of the data from your previous email campaigns and consolidate them into a master spreadsheet. Be sure to include:
- Past email subject lines & body content
- Past email open rates
- Past email CTRs
- Which user lists received which emails
- The criteria that had to be met for those users to get those emails
