Improve Your Email Click-Through Rate With These 14 Simple Tweaks

Neil Patel
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Author: Neil Patel | Co Founder of NP Digital & Owner of Ubersuggest
Published August 28, 2024

Marketers can get hung up on email open rates.

But I’d argue your email click-through rate (CTR) is much more important. 

It’s no good having sky-high open rates if consumers don’t take action. Sending out thousands of emails gets expensive, after all. You need sales to generate a return on your investment!

That’s why I’m going to show you how to improve your email CTR in this article. I’ll outline 18 of my favorite methods to encourage consumers to click, so you have plenty of options to raise your CTR above the 2.62 percent average

Key Takeaways

  • Email click-through rate is the percentage of people who click a link in an email out of the total number of people who received it.
  • Good design and layout are essential. Design a focused, single-column layout that’s consistent with your brand and website.
  • Give each email a single goal and call-to-action (CTA). Use HTML button tags to make your CTA eye-catching and clickable—even if users don’t have images enabled.
  • Optimize your email for smartphones. Almost half of users are likely to view your email on a mobile, so use a responsive design and compress your images.
  • Use urgency and scarcity to compel users to take action. 
  • Add social sharing links and a postscript at the bottom of the email. The former gives readers more ways to explore your brand; the latter gives you one more chance to get your message seen.
  • Optimize and test your emails. Use A/B testing to find the best-converting design before emailing your entire list—experiment with sending times to discover when your readers are most likely to click.

Table of Contents

1. Make Emails Look Consistent with the Brand/Website

My first tip on how to improve email click-through rates is all about being consistent. You need to make your emails look like your brand and website. Otherwise, customers won’t recognize your emails and may unsubscribe.

There are a few ways to keep your emails consistent:

  • Include your logo
  • Use the same font
  • Use your brand colors
  • Use the same tone and phrasing

Cat food brand Untamed does a great job of keeping its emails on-brand. Here’s one of their marketing emails:

An email example from Untamed.

And here’s their website:

The Untamed website.

Notice that they include their logo and use exactly the same colors and font. You can’t confuse the email with another brand.  

2. Use a Focused Layout

How you present information determines how readers react. Plan your email’s layout well, and you can encourage users to click your call-to-action (CTA). 

This Airbnb email does a great job of conforming to the F-pattern layout:  

A marketing email from Airbnb.

It opens with an eye-catching headline that spans the entire email and follows it up with an informative subheading. The email’s left alignment makes all of the copy easy to read—and even the call-to-action button aligns with an F pattern. The F-pattern is a common style of reading that many people use, starting by reading in a horizontal line, a lower horizontal line, then a vertical line to the right. 

Because people tend to read less and less until they start reading vertically, creating content that fits this pattern makes sure the most important content on a page gets read. 

3. Add High-Quality Images With Alt Tags

Make your emails pop with high-quality visuals that add meaning to your copy. They will capture your reader’s attention and help them to understand your message faster. 

Don’t just add images for the sake of it, though. Make sure they are relevant, like product shots or illustrated marketing messages like this example from Shake Shack:

A marketing email from Shake Shack.

While a text-based headline would let Shake Shack convey the same message, it wouldn’t be half as eye-catching as this image, nor would it allow the brand to incorporate Pride colors or sprinkles into the message. In this case the cliche holds true: a picture is worth 1000 words. 

Finally, add alt tags to your images so readers know what they should see if their email client blocks your visuals. 

An image with an alt tag.

You can also try adding links to images as they’re easier to click over the mobile compared to button or text-based CTAs.

4. Use Button CTAs

Clicking on a call-to-action button comes as naturally to us as twisting a doorknob or flicking a light switch.

Because buttons are inherently satisfying, use them for your primary CTAs. Readers should be much more likely to click. 

That doesn’t mean writing text links off completely, though. You should use text links whenever you want to add secondary CTAs so you don’t have two competing buttons. 

5. Use HTML to Create Buttons

While we’re on the topic of using buttons to improve email click-through rates, use HTML to create them. That means using the <button> HTML element in your email’s code just like Wunderlist has done here:

An HTML-generated button.

Most email clients don’t display images by default, so if you use a button image as your CTA, readers may not see it. Even with the images blocked in the example above, the CTA button stands out.

6. Offer Just One CTA

Every email you write should focus on a single offer or goal. 

Multi-purpose emails are confusing. You can’t ask recipients to read your latest blog post AND buy something in your sale. When given a choice like this, there’s every chance your consumers will choose neither option. 

Instead, use a single call-to-action that gives readers one action to take and one place to go. Both your customers and your click-through rates will thank you for it.

7. Pack a Punch With P.S. Sections

Your email’s heading and subject lines will always be the most important and eye-catching pieces of copy. 

But the next most important? That may come at the end of every email you send. 

A postscript (P.S.) is a sentence or thought added at the bottom of your email after signing off. It’s one last chance to reinforce your message or compel a reader into action, and, because of its location, it can be incredibly effective at converting them. 

An email using a postscript message.

Postscripts are also a great way to target people who scan your emails. I bet the “Are you feeling lucky?” line in the email above was the third thing you read, for example. 

We are visually drawn to postscripts, meaning they can stop scanners in their tracks and increase your email click-through rate as a result.  

8. Optimize for Smartphones

A staggering number of people read emails on their phones. That means you need to optimize your emails for smartphones if you’re serious about increasing the click-through rate of your email marketing efforts.

There are several ways you can do this:

  • Use a mobile-friendly design to ensure your email looks great on small screens. A single-column design will help here. 
  • Keep your emails short so they’re easy to digest. 
  • Make features user-friendly. For example, CTA buttons should be easily clickable. A large font size can help, too.
  • Compress your image file sizes to improve load times.

The great thing about responsive design and other mobile optimizations is that it doesn’t matter which screen your readers use—mobile, tablet, or desktop—it will look great and load quickly on all of them. 

9. Provide Social Sharing Options

Want to learn how to improve email click-through rate and reach of your emails? Then, include social sharing buttons. 

By adding links to your social profiles you give recipients more ways to discover your brand. They may not want to shop your sale right now, but they might want to follow you on Instagram.

An email with social sharing links.

Don’t stop there, though, Include a social sharing feature that lets recipients share your email with their followers on their favorite social platform. This can send your CTR soaring as people who have never received your email can click on your CTA.  

10. Pass the Squint Test

Just look at the following screenshot:

A blurred email with a clearly visible CTA button.

You can’t make out what the email says, but I bet you can point to the CTA button.

That’s what passing the squint test looks like. Readers should know exactly where to click, even if they’re squinting. This means that even if they quickly scan your email, there’s every chance they’ll click your CTA link to find out more. 

Big, colorful call-to-action buttons are an easy way to make your email pass the squint test. But don’t underestimate the power of images and headings to add structure and flow to your email. 

11. Use Urgency and Scarcity

Scarcity is a powerful motivator. 

No one wants to miss out on a good opportunity. So, if there’s even a hint that a sale might be ending or a product might be running out of stock, users will feel compelled to take action, and the click-through rate of your email marketing will soar.

There are several ways you can create a sense of scarcity and urgency among readers: 

  • Illustrate limited availability in your subject line
  • Integrate a countdown timer in your email’s body
  • Highlight an impending deadline
  • Send emails to consumers when stocks are low
  • Offer pre-launch pricing to subscribers

This email from PetSmart may not be the prettiest, but you can’t miss impending deadline in the headline:

A PetSmart email with limited-time deals.

Whatever you do, don’t imitate scarcity. Customers will feel disillusioned, even cheated, if they click on your countdown timer only to find your sale still has days to go. 

12. Segment Based on Behavior

You don’t have to send emails to everyone on your contact list. Segmentation involves dividing your email list into distinct groups based on various criteria. That could be demographic (like where they lived) or behavioral (like a recent purchase). 

Segmenting your list increases personalization and ensures emails resonate with recipients. They’re much less likely to hit unsubscribe and more likely to click your CTA. 

A common segmentation method is cart abandonment emails that only get sent to users who leave your site without completing a purchase. This is an excellent example from Sonos, which encourages shoppers to take another look at a product while reminding them there’s free shipping:

A marketing email from Sonos.

You can follow suit using an email marketing tool like Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor that comes with built-in segmentation capabilities. These tools can integrate with your website and CRM, letting you automatically segment users based on purchase behavior, website activity, and their location in your sales funnel. Increasingly, these platforms have predictive capabilities that can automatically segment lists by predicting future customer behavior. 

Automate your email marketing efforts even further by creating rules-based segmentation. This strategy automatically adds users to a particular list when they take a specific action on your site like signing up for your newsletter or making a purchase.

13. A/B Test Your Emails

A/B testing your emails (when you pit two versions of the same email against each other to see which is best) is one of the most fundamental ways of improving email click-through rates. 

You can’t know for sure how best to design your email, after all. But A/B testing gives you a couple of testing opportunities. 

There are plenty of elements you can experiment with, including the following:

  • Subject line
  • Images
  • Body copy
  • CTA button color
  • CTA button text
  • Sender’s name

It’s easy to set up an A/B email campaign, too. Almost every major email platform will have in-built split testing capabilities that let you send two different versions of an email to a portion of your audience and then send the winner out to everyone else. 

14. Optimize Send Times

Believe it or not, there’s a right time to send your emails. It’s not the same for everyone, though. Ideal opening times will change depending on your industry, target audience, location, and dozens of other factors. 

So, while guides like mine are a great jumping-off point, the only way to find the best sending times for your email click-through rate is to turn to your data. 

I recommend using my guide to choose a specific day to send your emails out (Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday) and then sending emails at three different times for several months (10 am, 2 pm, and 8 pm, say) to give you baseline data. You can then use these results as a control to test different days of the week and different times of day. 

FAQs

What is a good click-through rate for email?

What constitutes a good click-through rate will be different for every industry. That being said, research by Mailchimp finds the average CTR across all industries is 2.62 percent

It’s much lower for e-commerce stores (1.74 percent), though, and much higher for social networks and online communities (3.24 percent).

How to calculate email click-through rate?

Calculating your email click-through rate is easy. Simply divide the number of clicks your email receives by the number of emails you send and multiply by 100. 

So if you send 1000 emails and 100 people click on them, your CTR is 100/1000 * 100 = 10 percent.

What factors can affect email click-through rate?

Dozens of factors can impact your email click-through rate, including the:

Calls-to-action

Relevancy of your content to your email list

Subject line

Design and layout

How can A/B testing help improve email click-through rate?

Testing one version of your email against another, slightly different version will help you optimize for clicks. You can test one subject line against another, for example, to see which better compels users to take action. You can also split test:

Layout

Images

Calls-to-action

Offers

By testing one or more of the above optimizations on a small number of recipients first, you can send the best converting design to the rest of your list.

Conclusion

You don’t have to suffer with subpar click-through rates. Just using one or two of these strategies could see your click-through rates soar. 

But don’t try to implement them all at once. 

If you’re brand-new to email marketing, start with one or two of the easier-to-implement methods, like CTA buttons and postscripts. If you’re already automating your email marketing, start A/B testing your emails and optimizing send times. 

Best of luck!

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Neil Patel

About the author:

Co Founder of NP Digital & Owner of Ubersuggest

He is the co-founder of NP Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.

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Neil Patel

source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/improve-your-email-click-through-rate/