What is Email Click-through rate: 7 Practical Ways on How to Improve it? 

Email marketing retained its fame because of its low cost, effectiveness, and simplicity. As per Litmus, 4 out of 5 promoters would use email marketing than social media. But, how can you measure the success of your email marketing campaign?

A common metric to assess your email campaign performance is the Click-Through Rate.

Email Click-through rate means the percentage of clicks on the links cited in the emails successfully delivered to your customers and prospects.

What is Email Marketing CTR?

Usually, email campaigns aim to allure receivers with essential content and eventually make them act. To reach that stage, CTR helps you acknowledge the quality and value of your content by assessing taps or clicks on your Call-to-action (CTA). All in all, your email CTR assesses how many people who got your email tapped on the links mentioned inside it.

So, do you want to know what a good click-through rate for mail is? The answer differs by sector (for instance, 1% in the retail sector and 6% in the government sector), but the average CTR is 2.6%. So, do not worry if you have a single-digit CTR; it is normal!

However, what's essential here is to evaluate your CTR to measure how recipients react to your interactions and take steps to streamline your campaigns.

Steps to calculate your Email CTR

The formula to calculate email click-through rate is:

(Number of people who clicked / number of emails sent successfully) x 100

For instance: If a mail was delivered to 1000 recipients and 100 recipients click on the link present in the email, the formula will be:

(100/1000) x 100 = 10

The CTR is 10%.

Types of Click-through rates

Often, Click-through rate and Click-to-open-rate are used interchangeably. Though they have similarities, they are distinct metrics.

Once you know their difference, you can use them appropriately to streamline your emails for better results from your email marketing strategies.

CTR and CTOR

The Click-through rate assesses the number of emails that made a recipient tap on your call-to-action link.

For instance, if you send 5000 emails and later come to know that 50 people clicked on the link placed in it, you have a CTR of 1%. In simple words, for every 100 messages, you got 1 recipient click on the CTA button added.

On the other hand, Click-to-open-rate, assesses the percentage of recipients who open the mail and tap on the link. You don't need to know how many people received the email to calculate this. Rather, you should find out how many people opened the mail and clicked on the CTA.

So, if from 100,000, only 50,000 opened the message and 1000 clicked on the link, the CTOR is 2%.

CTOR assesses the efficiency of your email marketing strategy. If you have a higher CTOR, it states you are connecting well with your prospects and customers.

A click-to-open rate is not the same as an open rate. An open rate is the percentage of receivers who open the email. So, if 1000 opened the mail out of 5000 recipients, the open rate would be 20%.

The difference between CTR and CTOR is delicate, but there is a reason why email marketers prefer both.

An email can have a bad CTR but an amazing CTOR. Hence, tracking both and acknowledging their potential for enhancing an email list is important for a company.

Types of emails with the highest click-through rates:

Not all emails are drafted equally. Hence, there is a big difference in the email performance in all three types.

It is noticeable that autoresponder and triggered emails have better CTR and open rates as they are highly relevant to the subscribers.

• Autoresponder emails are welcoming emails and lead magnets for demos and downloading content.
• Triggered emails are sent depending on the action of the subscriber to complete a purchase or fill a form.
• Newsletter emails have low CTR, open, and CTOR rates.

Rather than choosing the average or good CTR or CTOR for you, it is important to determine where you stand now and where you want to reach.

Assess your email campaign performance and find out ways to augment them. Track your CTR for all mail types:

• Triggered emails
• Newsletter emails
• Autoresponder emails

By assessing your best and worst email campaigns, depending on the CTR, CTOR, and open rate; you can set objectives to improve them.

Ways to increase your click-through rate

Here are some tried and tested ways to increase your click-through rate:

1. Make it scannable

Recipients decide to keep or delete an email within 3 seconds after opening it. Another bad news, people do not read completely; they scan! 

However, the good news is that your emails can be made exclusively scannable. Make your emails simpler to read, and the easier it will get for the subscribers to look for CTA.

And, the sooner they find the CTA, the quicker they will click on them!

You can make your emails scannable by

• Presenting the essential data first
• Supplementing it with images, links, and other details.
• Explain to them the who, what, why, and how before their attention diverts.

2. Limit your CTA counts.

So if you want to eat a sandwich, but you are out of peanut butter, you would walk into a grocery store to find it. If you are flooded with options from different kinds of butter and brands and preserve options, you will eventually leave the store and have something else for lunch.

This attitude is known as analysis paralysis, where too many choices may confuse you.

The same happens with your email calls to action. If you add too many links, your subscriber may not be able to decide which one to choose. As per Ellie Mirman, adding one CTA boosts clicks by 371% and sales by 1617%.

As readers are always looking for a simple and easy-to-click spot, we suggest using the button on the text links and ensuring they are bulletproof.

Such buttons respond well and can be coded into emails. They are not treated as images, thereby lowering the load times of the email, and are at lower risk of being red-flagged. 

Efficient ways to leverage CTA buttons:

• Position the CTA Button after you have shared your offer.
• Interact in just one to three words.
• Choose action-based phrases such as start, search or learn.
• If you have one CTA in multiple places throughout your email, it enhances your opportunity of getting clicks. For instance, you can include one in an in-link link and then include a CTA below the text block.
• If you are using a call button as CTA, make sure you choose a toll-free customer care number to allow your customers to make free-of-charge calls to you. It increases the credibility of your business and helps you gain better CTA results.

3. Include some cool images

Well, plain text emails are good, but making your emails more appealing when you think of click-through to a landing page is important. Emails with pictures have 42% more CTR than emails without pictures.

With the help of GIFs, you can take the counting higher. According to the Email Institute, emails with GIFs get a higher click-through rate of 26%.

However, ensure the GIFs are not more than 1MB, or it may increase the loading time.

The major reason to use images in your email is that it enhances the appeal of your content and makes it more scannable for the readers. Adding pointers and information in graphics makes the readers read such information instantly without going through the entire mail. 

4. Mobile optimization

Mobile email is dicey. Readers who open emails on their PC are three times more likely to click than those on smartphones. However, computer clients make up just 16% of the opened emails while mobile clients make up 55%.

To boost your smartphone email CTR, you should streamline emails for smartphones. Choose a responsive design to make your email presentable on all devices.

Here are some tips for creating a mobile-optimized email:

• Keep the email width to 650 pixels
• Use alt text along with pictures.
• Choose image blocks rather than adding an image to a text block.
• Go for "hide on mobile" specification to avoid some content from emerging in mobile email.
• Go for a compatibility preview to check your email's presentation on every device.

5. Personalize your emails

Personalization has a vital role in efficient email marketing. Marketers using customized emails for their prospects see 39% more CTRs.

Segmenting your targeted audience and using dynamic content helps personalize your message and send the correct email at the correct time. Emails can be personalized with the right customer relationship management (CRM) solution. It collects your subscriber's location, preference, behavior, and demographics.

With personalization, you dig deeper into your demographic segment and aim to concentrate more on what appeals to your clients. Personalizing their emails or greeting them with a welcoming message or simply sending a thank you after shopping makes them more loyal and dedicated towards your business.

6. Test, check and repeat

Testing helps you improve your results. Test your emails on different devices and for different subscribers before sending them. It is important to ensure that every mail you send is the best in every way. Always ensure that your subscribers see your email like you want them to.

Choose split testing to A/B test everything of your email from subject line, content, pictures, CTA, and data.

Select the right metrics to choose the winner. Run tests to meet your goals and try beating your own benchmarks.

7. Choose better subject lines

A good way to improve your CTA clicks is to increase the number of people who open your emails. If only 1% of the receivers open the mail, your chance of getting more CTR is limited to 1%.

You may need some testing and efficient subject lines designed to keep your subscriber's segment in mind to increase it.

Some suggestions to improve your subject lines are:

• Add numbers and stats. (80% of companies)
• Start with a question. (Are you making these marketing mistakes)
• Suggest a value. (Get overheads slashed by 40%)
• Share the prices, especially if it is available for free. (Webinar session for free)
• Capitalize your subject line to get the attention of the readers. Writing anything in bold attracts the attention of the reader instantly. Even if they are scanning the email, the subject line will definitely make an impact.

Email Marketing Benchmarks Across Industries

Check out the email marketing benchmarks for the previous year:

• Unsubscribe rate: 0.20%
• Bounce rate: 4.31%
• CTR: 2.19%
• Email open rates: 19.96%

While they are averages and benchmarks set up by different industries, as a business owner, you should decide your CTR and goals, rather look at the percentage and then aim to enhance it.

In the end, you don't have a magical number. And every average works as a starting point for your own evaluation of different CTRs for your marketing campaigns.

To draft a baseline, you should analyze data. And track your CTR to see how they perform in a day or a month. This will help you check the data variations and improvements.

As a marketer, you can select how you want to run your email-related split test and which metric you choose to finalize the winner. Running the test should only be related to your goals, and your aim should be to beat your set benchmarks and strive to make new efforts.

Conclusion

Selecting the right email marketing metrics can be difficult. Hence, make sure you know what evaluations you want to make:

• Your open rate assesses your subject line performance
• Your CTR assesses the performance of your content and subject line.
• Your CTOR assesses your content's performance.

So, while measuring your email marketing metrics, concentrate on where your business stands currently and where you aim to take it to. With accurate data on how efficiently your emails are performing, you can take steps to improve with time by setting up your own benchmarks, keeping track of your successful campaigns, and taking better measures to boost your email CTR.

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