Struggling to figure out of your email is working? Click-through Rate is your key to knowledge.
For many businesses, email marketing creates great results while remaining inexpensive. It’s easy to understand why – almost everyone has at least one email account, and 34 percent check their email throughout the day. The focus, though, for business owners sometimes rests on email open rate, rather than click-through rate. So, what is a good email click-through rate?
A solid email marketing plan for your business is important. You have email addresses from people interested in your products or services already added to your mailing list. From here, you need to decide how often your company will send out newsletters, and if you have any plans for email drip campaigns. As long as you offer value in these emails, and schedule them consistently, you should see success.
What, though, is success? While it’s great to have a good open rate for your company’s emails – the average open rate hovers around 30-40 percent – all that means is people are opening your emails. How long did they have the email open? Did they read the entire email, or did they skim it? Did they open it, look at it for two seconds, then delete it? You don’t know, and that’s the point. The open rate for your company’s emails doesn’t necessarily equate success.
What is a Good Email Click-Through Rate?
While the email open rate only tells you the percentage of people who opened the email, the email click-through rate actually tells you the percentage of people who actually clicked on the link you provided in the email. You want people to read your emails, but the main purpose of the email is to get them to click on the link, which could be anything from a new blog post to an ebook.
[tweetthis]In any email marketing campaign, if you provide value, people are more likely to click the link in the email.[/tweetthis]Of course, when you send out an email newsletter to those on your mailing list, you hope everyone opens it and clicks on the links. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality. You read earlier what makes up a good open rate – which is less than half of the people who received an email – your click-through rate will be much lower.
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In fact, a good email click-through rate is anywhere from 3.5 percent to 5 percent.
Ways to Increase Click-Through Rate
That percentage can be a little disheartening if you don’t know what to expect. A good email click-through rate is going to depend on different factors.
- Subject line: Obviously, people can’t click on your link if they don’t open the email. A good subject line will either encourage people to open the email and read it, or cause them to just delete it. The email open rate is used when calculating the click-through rate.
- Link positioning: Where is the link in the email? At the top, middle, bottom? Side, maybe? Wherever it’s placed, it needs to be abundantly clear to the reader what it is, and that they should click on it. They can’t click on the link if they can’t find it.
- Time of day: The time you schedule your email to go out plays a role in whether it will be opened. It’s recommended you schedule your email newsletters sometime midmorning during the work week. This, of course, varies depending on your email list.
There are other factors to keep in mind, such as the length of the email (busy professionals don’t have time to read long emails), the content of the email, and a host of others. The key points to remember for a good email click-through rate – and email marketing in general – are provide value, keep a consistent schedule, and make sure your emails are concise.
Need Help Getting a Good Email Click-Through Rate?
Email marketing is valuable and important. It helps to increase sales and provides an inexpensive way for your business to reach a targeted audience. Getting the most out of email marketing, however, can be challenging.
At New North, we understand these issues because we’ve heard from other business owners, just like you, who want to see better results from their email marketing. We’ve worked with many businesses to either start or better their email marketing plans. From good open rates to getting a good email click-through rate, our knowledgeable team can help your company succeed.