18 Tips for Maximizing Your Click-Through Rates

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 of "How to Get the Best ROI From Your Email Marketing Campaigns"

So you piqued prospects’ interest and got them to open your promotional email. The next crucial step: Motivate them to click-through to your promotion. In this month’s feature – Part 2 in a 3-part FulcrumTech series on optimizing the response to your email campaign – we take a close look at the email itself and offer several ways to help make your click-through rates soar.

1. Make headlines clear, concise, credible and relevant. Keep in mind that the role of headlines in promotional emails is to grab readers’ attention and entice them to read more, not to make a sale. Make sure your headline in the body copy is also consistent with your subject line to avoid confusion.
2. Focus on clarity and brevity for copy. Copy should be short enough so you don’t lose readers’ interest, but long enough to provide the pertinent information your customers need.
3. Always keep paragraphs short. Long paragraphs are psychologically intimidating to readers.
4. Create a sense of urgency by setting a deadline. A limited time offer, for example, will often push an interested prospect into a buying customer.
5. Get personal. The tone you set is important. Be sure it’s not too much sales hype and not too stiff and formal. A personal, friendly, informative tone tends to be the most effective.
6. Use an active voice, rather than a passive voice to help keep your message strong. For example: “We added new products,” is stronger than “New products have been added.”
7. Limit “spammy” words like “FREE,” “click” and “cash.” A few of such words used judiciously shouldn’t set off the spam alarms, just be careful not to overuse them.
8. Consider adding a P.S. if it fits with the copy and offer. Postscripts are consistently read and remembered by readers.
9. Include privacy information. This is one way to build credibility.
10. Include customer testimonials when you can. It’s another way to help add credibility to your offer. Keeping these in close, physical proximity to your click through can help as well.
11. Make it new and fresh. It’s important not to use the same copy from one promotional email to the next. People will eventually tire of the same stale phrases and eventually stop reading your emails.
12. Keep PDAs in mind for design. Because many people today read their emails on a Blackberry or iPhone, it’s a good idea to test what your email looks like on mobile devices. And, at FulcrumTech we have some great tools that can help with this for those trying to reach an audience, which is significantly mobile.
13. Limit the size of images to help ensure fast loading.
14. Don’t put any vital information in an image just in case it’s disabled.
15. Keep the layout simple. For example, use a 1-column format versus 2 and certainly not 3 columns.
16. Don’t go crazy with background color, as brightly colored background can increase spam scores. (White background is the lowest scoring.)
17. Consider the path the eye travels in design. Be sure all images, headlines and subheads work together to draw the readers’ attention through the email message.
18. Test your promotional emails. Headlines, offers, HTML versus text, and copy are all aspects of the promotional email that you should test regularly. Check out Marketing Experiments’ “Email Marketing Tested” for a great example of how and what to test in your promotional emails.

As you create your next promotional email, keep in mind that your goal is to get the click-through. In next month’s NewsLever, we’ll share proven effective FulcrumTech strategies on how to convert the sale by optimizing your promotional landing page – the next important step in getting the best ROI from your email campaigns.

Related Links — How to Get the Best ROI from Your Email Marketing Campaigns:

• Part 1: Create Compelling Subject Lines
• Part 3: 5 Strategies for Creating Landing Pages That Convert