4 Tips to Optimize E-mail Clickthrough Rates
February 18, 2009 By Heather Fletcher, Senior Editor, Target MarketingE-mail clickthroughs can be like hubs on bicycle wheels. A lot is going on around them and needs to connect through them in order to deliver its rider to a destination. So direct marketers believe optimizing e-mail clickthrough rates will help them reach their goals of higher sales.
"I think of [the clickthrough rate] as the fulcrum in your e-mail marketing program, particularly from a metric and conversion perspective," says Loren T. McDonald, vice president of industry relations for e-mail marketing firm Silverpop of Atlanta.
If the goal of an e-mail is to get its recipient to take action, he elaborates, then the clickthrough is the first decision, or the first action in the process leading to conversion.
He and other representatives of e-mail marketing services firms provided a plethora of optimization ideas.
1. Think of e-mail marketing as a process.
Mike's Bikes of San Rafael, Calif. is seeing an e-newsletter view rate of 60 percent, possibly due to the 20 percent discount sign-up incentive. Nine percent of January's revenue is attributable to the e-mail marketing efforts, says the company's Sacramento, Calif.-based e-mail provider, StreamSend.
But optimizing all the links in the chain can help marketers improve at every step along the way, resulting in a cumulative improvement, says Kevin Mabley, senior vice president of strategic services for Dallas-based marketing services firm Epsilon.
2. Segment recipients, and target them accordingly.
Dan Forootan, president and CEO of StreamSend, points to CeramicArtsDaily.org. The ceramics news site provides an e-newsletter sign-up incentive, a 2009 Ceramic Arts Buyers Guide, and an incentive to click through after receiving the welcome e-mail, a copy of 7 Great Pottery Projects. The site that sends targeted communications and offers sees up to 26 percent clickthrough rates on e-mails.
Marketers can use customer profile information from multiple channels to, for instance, track in-store behavior and allow retailers to send an e-mail offer of a red purse to an in-store red shoe buyer, says Kristin Hambelton, senior director of marketing for French enterprise marketing software provider Neolane. Hambelton works in Neolane's Newton, Mass.-based U.S. headquarters.
One client, the U.K. wedding and special occasion business Confetti, personalized e-mails individually with such information. In 2008, right after moving to this approach, Confetti achieved an open rate of 33 percent, a clickthrough rate of 10 percent and a conversion rate of 1.3 percent. The average order value rose 85 percent, she adds.
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E-mail Marketing that Works
While CTR still is a good measurement of interest and keeping the focus on CTR first is a good thing to achieving conversion, if you use social nets as an example, you have to get over that hump of CTR only. While sites such as Facebook and Twitter have big numbers and you can run a CTR only study on these sites, the actual conversion post click is rather low. Many advertisers found that out the hard way back in '07, '08 by advertising on Facebook via mass buy CPM. The CTR could be good, but what was missing was targeting to the right audience. Without any type of targeting, for advertisers, it was nothing more than burning that $100 bill to light the cigar. What does work is A/B Testing. Even with e-mail and even with a strictly CTR test, the ultimate goal of any campaign is some sort of conversion. Sheer numbers and volume will achieve CTR, but in the end, without that conversion, you still have nothing.
Excellent article and starting comments of CTR being the fulcrum of a campaign really helped me alot and not always being so focused on conversion ratio only, thank you, www.diamondseverlasting.com