6 Email Tips to Get More Clicks

Email is the undisputed king of marketing, and has firmly defended the throne for years now.

It’s one of the very best ways to tell people about your product or service, keep them engaged, and make sales roll in.

But if your emails aren’t performing as you expect – or hope – there’s a few things you can mix up to rejuvenate a flagging list.

Take a look at our helpful hints and tips for getting more leads via email:

1. Keep subject lines short and interesting

You have a couple of seconds to capture the attention of a habitual inbox-scroller. What do you say?

According to Convince and Convert, 35% of email recipients open email only if the subject line grabs their attention. That’s why so many now include emojis, slang and other hyper-personal touches to trigger our attention.

Not only that, but 66% of all emails are now viewed on tablets and smartphones. Screen sizes will vary hugely, but most email clients truncate at around 30 characters… that’s way less than an old-school tweet. Aim for approximately 25 characters (4-7 words) to maximise your chances of piquing the reader’s interest.

2. Add more links

Usually, you want the person who receives your email to take an action after opening your message. And usually, this is clicking a link.

You can actually increase your click-through rate by adding more links – something which seems counterintuitive when you remember most direct response copy does better when it includes only one call to action.

A study done by Launch Bit showed that email newsletters with more than two links got nearly twice as many clicks as newsletters with just one link – but there is a catch. Adding multiple links may decrease clicks for any one link… so if you want readers to take just one action, it will be more effective to add the same link more than once.

3. Personalise it!

For starters, asking for the recipient’s first name in the signup form lets you include it later on in emails with shortcodes provided by your autoresponder service. Using their name in a subject line or greeting goes some way to personalise the experience – but it’s possible to go a step further.

(Wondering if asking for extra information impacts conversions? Check out our What’s in a Name article – it’s all about a split test experiment we performed not long ago which answers that question once and for all.)

Segment your lists to further narrow down your audience, and tailor your message according to the criteria you select. Are they interested in just one benefit of your product or service? Do you have a clear split of gender or location?

There are ways of personalising the experience through your copy without knowing more about your audience, by being authentic and sharing your failures once in a while, using a conversational tone and using hyper-specific examples that will only be relevant to your audience. By narrowing your focus, it’s possible to greatly increase conversions.

4. Boost your CTA

It’s all well and good using multiple links to the same destination, as per step 2… but what do those links say?

Certain things work better than others for an enticing call to action, so if yours isn’t performing as well as you want here’s a few pointers to a more compelling CTA:

Clear (“Join”)
Direct (“Join Now”)
Specific (“Click This Link Right Now”)
Relevant (“Claim Your Membership – TODAY”)
Formatted (bold or caps, or otherwise standing out from the main paragraph text)

5. Use a P.S.

To amateur eyes, the postscript might just look like a hastily-added footnote, a reminder or a simple last-minute thought. But, to email masters, it’s one of the most important tools they can use to boost conversions.

Humans automatically pay attention to the first and last items in a sequence – this is why your subject line is such an important first impression, and why your P.S. should be the complementary bookend to your deliciously persuasive email sandwich.

Use your P.S. to include a CTA, reminder about urgency, or another follow-on connected to the subject line for the best effect.

6. Resend unopened emails

This is such a simple trick – but so many marketers don’t do it. When OKDork resent an email to anyone who didn’t open it the first time round, they got 11% more opens for the second email than the first for a total 39.95% open rate – almost double the 21.01% average CTA… and it took less than a minute.

We hope you found these tips useful! How much can you increase your open, clickthrough and conversion rate? Leave us a comment below letting us know how you get on!