Effective tactics for improving your email clickthrough rate

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Nov 2, 2015 / by
Effective tactics for improving your email clickthrough rate

In 2015, over 205 billion emails are sent and received every day. This figure is expected to rise to as much as 246 billion by the end of 2019.


If you’re looking to improve your email marketing strategy, it’s important to remember that every person you contact is probably receiving a stupid amount of emails every single day. But by applying the following principles you can make your emails stand out from the crowd and significantly boost your open rate.

Craft a compelling subject line

Just as a blog post needs a great headline if you want people to read it, the subject lines for your marketing emails also require expert care. A subject line should have approximately 50 characters, but don’t worry if you are slightly over or under that limit. The trick is to keep it succinct while accurately conveying the gist of content within. Telling the beginning of a story with your subject line or phrasing it as a question are both effective strategies. For more comprehensive information about crafting great subject lines, check out this guide courtesy of Digital Marketer.

A/B test your subject lines

No matter how great you think your subject lines are, it’s always best to A/B test them if you want to improve your clickthrough rates. Popular email campaign tools such as Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor have inbuilt A/B testing tools, but you can accomplish this manually too. Simply split your list into two and send each list a different email. Once you’ve run the campaign for an extended period of time, you’ll want to analyse your open rate and see what conclusions you can draw.

Writing for CoSchedule, blogger Julie Neidlinger firmly advocates A/B testing your email subject lines. After analysing 3 months of data from an A/B test, she found that subject lines containing a promise fared extremely well, the 50 character rule proved to be true and the emotional value of the subject line correlated strongly to the clickthrough rate. She states:

“In the never-ending struggle to find a way to get readers to click and read your content, testing your email subject lines (just as you test headlines) is important. Not only for that specific email, ensuring that your best email goes out to your list, but also to learn about what attracts your list the best.”

Invoke familiarity

People are far more receptive to communication from other human beings than they are from unfamiliar, faceless corporations. Although a marketing email is not a two-way dialogue, you may find it effective to write your email content in a conversational style. Always include the recipient’s name at the beginning of the email and include content tailored to that individual.

While a batch email can never be 100% personal, you can definitely improve your content if you imagine your archetypal fan as the sole recipient. Alternatively, segmenting your list by demographic is another way to make your content feel more personal. If you don’t know what the hopes, desires, interests and most importantly, problems of your target audience are, it’s time to do some serious research!

Consider the objective of your email

Optimise your email campaign for mobile devices

Optimise your email campaign for mobile devices

While it’s great to provide high quality email content for your audience to read, you must also consider what you want the email to accomplish. If you want to funnel your audience to a landing page which features an exclusive offer for your mailing list, structure your email content to achieve this. If you don’t know what your call to action is, then you cannot hope for your marketing emails to be successful!

Optimise for mobile devices

Incase you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that mobile internet access is increasing at an astonishing rate. In fact, research indicates that 65% of all emails are now opened using mobile devices! If your marketing emails are incorrectly formatted on mobile devices, people will be needlessly missing your call to action. Mobile optimisation is an absolute no brainer if you are looking to run a successful email marketing campaign in 2015.

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