The best reward for us, email marketers, is a high response rate from our subscribers or customers. We’re proud of our message and we hope it’s going to find a broad response among the prospects. After the email is sent, our hearts fill with joy while the numbers in our reports are growing and growing.

But what if our rosy anticipations are not justified? What if the reports are disappointing? There is a ground for some analysis and research.

So, don’t give up, pick up your reports and emails and start working at improving the situation.

The first questions you should ask yourself are “Did I send to the right list? Was the email relevant? Was it valuable?”

If the answers are yes, yes and yes, dig further and now look at your email content.

The best and simple way to improve a click rate is test the email, find what works better and send the best copy to the list. But how many of us test our newsletters before sending them? We are so time-pressed and eager to get the email out so we forget that a few extra hours we would spend on test could bring us much more clicks and probably sales.

Some email marketing services now offer the A/B split testing capability when different versions of the email are sent to a certain portion of the list. The service collects the responses and when the winner copy is identified, it is sent to the rest of subscribers.

If you prefer desktop email marketing software, G-Lock EasyMail is the best solution. Not only does this bulk email program allow create and send HTML email newsletters, it is the first in the world desktop email software that supports the A/B split testing feature mentioned above. So, download G-Lock EasyMail now and start testing and optimizing your email campaigns.

If you have no access to the testing functionality, there is the alternative way – dive into previous reports and email campaigns to understand what works best.

While analyzing old reports, look at the subject lines, offers, days of the week, sending time of the emails that got a better response rate. All these elements are very important.

Plus, a lot of other factors such as the URL layout, anchor text, quantity of URLs in the email, position of the URL relative to other links, etc. are worth your attention too. All of them may bring you some extra clicks if you optimize them.

So, let’s analyze some of the factors and see how they can be optimized for a higher response rate.

Number of links in the teaser text

If you email newsletter contains teasers with links to the full articles, look how many call-to-action links each teaser includes. I bet there is one URL at the end of each teaser.  

Well, why not add one more link somewhere in the middle of the teaser like the example below shows? The links in the teaser lead to the same web page. Only the anchor text is different.

 
Here are some statistics (calculated based on our past email campaigns):

Average click-through rate with 1 link in the teaser is 7.3%
Average click-through rate with 2 links in the teaser is 9.6%

How can we explain this difference?

The intuition suggests that an extra link adds more value to the teaser. Or, maybe people are attracted by the choice of links to click on. If they did not click on the first URL, they can’t resist clicking on the second one. Or, maybe I am totally wrong I don’t know.

But the fact is that an extra link to the teaser improves the click-through rate.

If there are several teasers in your email and they have headlines, why not link the teaser headline to your landing page? Or, what about placing the final call-to-action link apart from the text to make it stand out?

So, just use your imagination how you can make your call-to-action links more attractive to your subscribers.

Gap between links in the teaser

It appears that the distance between call-to-action links in the teaser can affect the click-through rate as well. Here are some statistics received from our reports.

On the above screenshot the gap between call-to-action links in the first teaser was 28 words. The click-through rate for those links was 11%. In the second teaser the gap was 14 words and the click-through rate was 15%.

The intuition says that maybe two links should not be put far away from each other. Probably a higher "link density" has an impact on the prospect’s decision to click. If there is a big distance between links, the teaser should be longer. And people like brief and to the point teasers clearly stating what is in the full article. Again, these are only my assumptions but why not experiment with the length of the teaser and gap between links? Your future reports will show if you are on the right way.

Call-to-action link anchor text

Below are CTO rates for call-to-action links with different anchor texts:

“Read more” or “continue reading” – 5.3%
"Learn more" – 6.7%
"Find out” or “find more" – 8.4%

“Learn” and “Find” are more active words. They promise some new information the subscriber did not know and will not know if he doesn’t click. I would even say these two words are more teasing than a passive and neutral “read”. That’s why they produce a higher response rate.

However, there are a few “but’s” you should keep in mind when choosing the anchor text for your call-to-action link:

• The call-to-action link should not be in isolation from the teaser text. It should go with what you say in the teaser. So, choose “Learn more” or “Find out” only if there is actually something to learn or discover in the full article.
• The link design does matter too. So, you may consider placing a HTML button instead of a text link. Just note that this will not work for plain text readers and you’ll need to put a full link into the text part of your email.
• Different anchor texts may work differently for different subscribers. Impulsive buyers respond better to the “get it now” call to action while information seekers like “learn more about this” links. So, why not optimize your call-to-action links based on the information you know about the subscribers?
• The call-to-action link anchor text may become less important with time as prospects get used to the email and will easily recognize the link. Long-term subscribers may be less sensitive to how the call-to-action link looks like than new members of the list.

Teasers order in the email

Links in the teasers that go the first in the email get more clicks. It’s no wonder. The most valuable and interesting articles are always featured on top positions so they are likely to produce more clicks.

And what is interesting is that the final teaser gets more clicks than the teasers in the middle of the email. I suppose this is because people actually scan the email from top to bottom and then click on the last link they see.

So, consider placing less but not least important articles at the bottom of your teaser list. 

To summarize, I don’t want you to think that one anchor text and one article structure are always better than others. Your list has its own particularities so you should customize your text and call-to-action links depending on what exactly you want people to do.

I just want to say that words, link position and email structure do matter and they can make a difference in responses when it comes to taking people to a full article.

Now I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts. What did you try? What worked best? What failed? Leave me a comment below and let’s discuss.

Tags: click-through rate, email newsletter, html email

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