Practical Ways To Increase Click-Through Rate

What's a good click-through rate? How can you drive a click-through rate increase in your email marketing? Is it possible? Why does it even matter?

Let's find out the answers to these questions - and more!

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

(0:11) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!

(4:29) Why is your click-through rate an important metric in your email marketing?

(11:33) What is the average click-through rate in your industry?

(14:30) Click-through rate average and daily emails.

(20:20) Techniques to improve your click-through rate.

(25:06) Segment your audience.

(27:50) Create a promotional strategy.

(30:14) Aim to trigger different emotions.

(31:59) Create calls to action that stand out.

(35:23) Keep your list clean.

(38:00) Subject lines of the week.

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Why is your click-through rate an important metric in email marketing?

For several reasons, click-through rates are now more important than they’ve ever been. First of all, when someone clicks on the links in your emails, it gives them the ability to get to a page where they can find out more about how to put money in your pocket. Sure - sometimes you'll send them to a page where they can register for something (rather than buying). But these are the exceptions to the rule.

The second reason why click-through rates matter is that, as time goes on, engagement shows Gmail and all the other platforms that your emails are important to people. It tells them they're of good quality and relevant. This is why we built a specific re-engagement campaign to keep people engaged - it's called the LOL Revival campaign and is available inside our programme.

Engagement is key. You have to determine whether someone is super engaged or has disengaged with your emails. Clicking on the links in our emails is a clear indicator they are, indeed, engaged. Technically, replying and forwarding your emails are better ways of engaging, but it’s hard to get people to do that regularly. So aiming for clicks is what you should do.

Click-through rates and segmentation

Another reason why clicks are important is that they allow you to understand what each subscriber is interested in. You'll start to notice that every time you send an email about a certain topic and with a specific angle, some people will click on the links in those emails. But they might never engage with other angles. Why? Because different things work for different people. And monitoring those clicks is great for segmentation.

Be careful with segmentation, though. Don’t get too carried away by adding tags that are too specific. Try not to get too tag-happy, and only allocate tags that you’re going to use. Make sure you use clear links so that when people click on them, you know they're interested in a particular topic. So, for example, if you’re including a link that points to a resource about building your email list, make sure the link is something like “check out my list building course”. It shows a clear interest in that topic.

A great use of segmentation with link clicking is what we call a link pool. We use this in one of our campaigns, where we ask people to vote on what they're more interested in. This allows you to segment your subscribers efficiently because what they click on shows a higher level of intent.

What is the average click-through rate in your industry?

Average click-through rates can vary massively. Just like open rates and other kinds of engagement metrics, they are going to change over time and depend on what you're doing. First of all, click-through rates depend on how many opportunities you give someone to click on your links. If you’re only sending one email a week, and you only have one link in there, you're not giving people a lot of chances. But if you email your list 7 days a week, and you have at least one link in your emails (plus a bunch of other ones in your Super Signature), you’re giving someone plenty of opportunities to click on your links.

Also, when someone joins your list, you’re at the top of their consciousness. You can take advantage of the recency bias because you’re the most recent thing they’ve engaged with. Right now, they know your name. And for the first 60 days, you’re going to get the best open and click-through rates of your entire relationship with a subscriber. After that, those rates are going to reduce, especially if you’re continually sending people to the same product, which we call a robot offer. That's why for the first 60 days, we send people to different offers using our SCORE email engine. If by the end of that period, they haven’t bought, we know they had the best opportunity to do so.

Throughout the various campaigns we send in this time, we talk about the same offer from different perspectives and in different ways. The offer is cloaked behind different bits of content, and our click-through rates are quite high – around 10-15%. They're higher than the industry averages because we present all our links in different ways. We're also continuously refreshing the person’s attention via the different campaigns.

Click-through rate average and daily emails

After the initial 60 days, our subscribers start receiving our live daily emails, and our click-through rate drops to around 1%, which is completely normal. Why? First of all, in our daily emails, we’re almost always telling people exactly what the links are about. And they're mostly about our programme - The Email Hero Blueprint. By then, people have been around long enough to know what we sell, which is why these emails don't get a huge amount of clicks.

But if we run a particular promotion for one week, for example, and change the content of our emails (and therefore our links), the click-through rate shoots up again. Typically, it'll be even higher than what we had in the first 60 days. And then we see it drop again when we go back to the daily live emails that talk about our core product. This is fine with us because the people who do click on the links in those emails, do it with a high level of intent.

On average, our click-through rate is less than 5% - at around 2.62% across the board. This data includes the click-through rate we see in the first 60 days and then the long-term nurture sequence in the shape of our daily emails. We understand this data. And we know the reason for this is that we no longer churn out new campaigns for different products every 6-8 weeks like we used to do and recommend our students to do. If we did that, we’d see our average click-through rate increase significantly. We know that because we used to see this, and our members who use the same strategy have higher click-through rates when they sell different products. But we focus on just one thing, which explains our average click-through rate.

Click-through rate fluctuations explained

Here are a few more details about what we do in our business. When someone joins our email list, they go through our Welcome sequence - the Getting to Know You sequence. For those 4 days, click-through rates are quite high. In fact, for the first couple of emails, we’re getting 80-90% open rates and high click-through rates. Then people go through our SCORE email engine, which takes up to 60 days for most people, and again, click-through rates are quite high at around 10-15%, depending on which bit of a campaign someone’s in.

If we’re gathering interest and showing people a lot of different things, our click-through rate tends to be a bit lower. But when our subscribers move into the conversion part of these campaigns, the click-through rate increases again because people now have real intent.

When they come out of the engine and continue to receive our daily emails, which 99% of the time talk about The Email Hero Blueprint, people start to become blind to it. They'll only click on the links if they want to find out more. And that means they have a certain level of intrigue or intent.

On the other hand, when we run limited-time promotions, we tend to get a 90% open rate during the 7 days. And the same happens to click-through rates – they spike up!

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Techniques to improve your average click-through rate

We suggest you try some of these techniques and see what works for you. You might even find that some of them don't work because your...