Increase Your Click-Through Rate by 50 Percent?
How do you encourage readers to interact with your email newsletter? Make it clear WHO they’re interacting with.
How do you encourage readers to interact with your email newsletter? Make it clear WHO they’re interacting with.
Dear Reader,
You won’t want to miss today’s column — we talk about how one email newsletter increased its click-through rate by 50 percent overnight. Here’s the best part: It’s simple and doesn’t cost anything. You can easily apply it to your email newsletter and hopefully see similar results. Read on to learn more…
Getting your email newsletter opened and read is the name of the game, especially in this tight advertising market. Advertisers want to know more than just how many people your email newsletter was sent to — they want to know how many opened it (open rate) and how many interacted with it (click-through rate, or CTR).
One of the simplest, least expensive ways to increase your open rate and CTR is to give your newsletter a distinctive personality. A good first step is adding a brief opening at the top, a personal note from the editor that pulls your reader in and builds a relationship.
The opening I used at the top of this article is an example. When one of the editors I was working with added this type of opening to her business-to-business (B2B) email newsletter for the wireless industry, we saw an immediate increase of 50 percent in the CTR. Adding just a few sentences, which took the editor mere moments to compose, generated a 50 percent increase.
Why? It makes the newsletter more engaging because it is obviously from a real person. The “Dear Reader” (or even better: “Dear Jeanne,” if you know the subscriber’s name) adds a personal touch often missing from mass-mailed email newsletters, especially in the B2B arena. In this case, we saw that articles referenced in the opening garnered the highest CTRs — regardless of their location in the email newsletter. But just as a rising tide lifts all boats, this opening increased average click-through on all items in the email newsletter — not just the items mentioned in the opening.
Ready to give it a try? Here are some guidelines:
Give it a shot and let me know your results! This is just one of the simple things you can do to engage your reader and optimize your CTR.