In this age of social media marketing, email is still one of the most effective ways to reach your customers.  It is one of the most trusted ways to communicate with your customers. You’ve designed an email campaign with a catchy subject line that leads to an increase in open rate, in other words more customers open. Now what?

How do you know that your email marketing campaign is successful? There are several email marketing metrics that matter in measuring the success of an email campaign. One important metric is the number of customers that click on the Call to Action in your email, also known as the  Click-Through Rate. It is a metric that matters to measure your audience engagement. CTR is measured as the percentage of clicks on the Call to Action. To calculate the CTR, take the number of clicks on your Call to Action and divide it by the total number of emails that you sent and multiply the resulting number by 100.  Let’s look at some of the ways in which you can get customers to click on the Call to Action in your email.

Have a clear goal in mind

Every email campaign must be designed with a clear goal in mind. Do you want to increase online purchases in general, or do you want to sell a particular product by sending messages to customers to avail an offer on the product? Whatever your end goal is, the email campaign must reflect this goal, clearly.

Keep your subject and copy crisp

Both the subject and the copy of the email must reflect your goal and you should keep your subject and copy crisp and minimal to avoid sending any mixed messages to the customer. Less is more when it comes to subject and copy length. 

Segment your customers

Prior to starting an email campaign, it’s important to segment your customers, in terms of customer behavior. Customer segmentation is a method of breaking up your email list based on similar characteristics of customers. This could be demographics, geography, purchasing power, shopping preferences, past purchases, etc. Customer segmentation plays a huge role in enhancing email click-through rates. If you are targeting customers in one particular location with an offer, there’s no point in sending emails nationwide to all customers. You will have much more success targeting the right segment of customers. 

Personalize your email

It’s a well known fact that personalized emails increase open rates and click through rates.  According to data shared by CampaignMonitor, personalized emails have a 26% chance of being opened. Personalization is using data that you already know about a customer and tailoring the message based on the data. You can personalize your email in different ways. The personalized message could be based on location, birth date, products searched, products purchased, etc.  People respond better to personalized messages rather than generic messages and this will increase your CTR. 

Have a clear and prominent Call to Action

The Call to Action should not be generic. If you want the customer to subscribe to your service, shop products or redeem an offer, the Call To Action should clearly indicate that and take them to the most relevant page where they can complete the action. Avoid having multiple Call to Actions  in your email and make sure that the CTA is prominent  enough that the customer can find it easily by scanning the email.

Visually appealing copy

The copy of your email should be consistent with the subject line as well as have visually appealing images.  No one likes to get an email where the copy is so cluttered that the message is unclear and the entire intention is lost. Using GIFs in your email also gets people’s attention. Make every opportunity to communicate with your customer count. 

Optimize for mobile

Mobile traffic accounts for half of the internet traffic worldwide, and more than 50% of emails are opened on mobile. Don’t miss out on this huge opportunity by not optimizing your emails for mobile. If emails are not optimized for mobile, it will lead to a poor experience for the customer and affect your brand as well. 

Optimize for Day and Time

Send emails only during the days and times that they are most likely to get opened. You can either test this or go by industry research. Also pay attention to geographies and time zones while sending out email marketing communications to get the optimal results.

Use email sparingly

Continually bombarding the customer with emails will create a negative experience. Don’t annoy your customer so much that they end up unsubscribing because of the sheer number of emails that they receive. Use email sparingly, but when you send emails, offer a good experience with information that provides value to the customer.  You should also make it easy for customers to unsubscribe from your emails, so that they only receive the emails that they are interested in.

Create excitement and urgency

Creating a sense of urgency is one of the tactics you can use to improve CTR. When you give the customer an offer that is time bound, they are more likely to click on your Call to Action and redeem the offer.  You should also crease a sense of excitement within your emails so that the customer feels special is excited as well. 

A/B Test

A/B Testing or Split testing is a method by which you split the segment that receives your email into two segments with only one variable changed to see which segment responds better to the email. A/B testing can be done on a wide variety of parameters in the email such as Subject, Call to Action, copy, images to see which one performs better. If you’re not sure about a particular layout or a copy, don’t hesitate to perform an A/B test with two layouts or two copies when in doubt. At the same time make sure that you keep everything else as a constant but change only one variable to get a decisive result for your  A/B test. You should be continually testing and iterating and improving on your email communications.

With some careful planning and strategy you can increase your email click-through rate. Let me know which of these strategies worked best for you in the comments below.

Shuba is a blogger at Bazaar Expert who blogs about business, software products, personal finance and marketing. She is interested in minimalism and is always looking for ways to declutter her life.