Silverpop – Boosting Your Click Rate
By: Silverpop
Despite the attention many marketers pay to open rates, the only real proof that your email is getting your subscribers’ attention is when they click on a link within the email after opening it. Clicks are the true measure of whether anyone is actually reading your emails and thinking about what you’re trying to say to them — they’re the opening step in the sales process. This graph, taken from my new book Strategic Database Marketing 4th Edition(McGraw-Hill 2012), shows the percentage of those who have opened their emails who have clicked on a link.
As you can see, the average click rate is about 25 percent, which means that, on average, only about 3.75 percent of all regular commercial emails are clicked on (15 percent average open rate times 25 percent). This is nothing to worry about since emails are very inexpensive to send (roughly $4 per thousand or $0.004 each) compared to about $0.50 per direct mail letter. But while you don’t need to worry about the emails that don’t get opened or clicked on from a cost standpoint, you do need to worry about where your emails stand on this graph.
I worked recently with a well-known and highly successful company that had several hundred thousand email subscribers. Their open rate was greater than 20 percent, but their click rate per opened email was about 7 percent — near the bottom of the graph. What was wrong? The emails were obviously not interesting enough to subscribers to get them to read them. This meant, of course, that their emails were not getting thousands of their subscribers to buy what they were selling.
This graph is a wake-up call: Increase the click rate, and you stop leaving money on the table. But how can you boost click rates? There are many ways, but they can all be summarized in one phrase fromGary Stein, iCrossing’s SVP of strategy and planning: “Every click is a wish” — a wish for something interesting, new or exciting to happen.
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