What's a good click-through rate? How can you drive a click-through rate increase in your email marketing? Is it possible? Why does it even matter? 

Let's find out the answers to these questions – and more!

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:11) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!
(4:29) Why is your click-through rate an important metric in your email marketing?
(11:33) What is the average click-through rate in your industry?
(14:30) Click-through rate average and daily emails.
(20:20) Techniques to improve your click-through rate.
(25:06) Segment your audience. 
(27:50) Create a promotional strategy.
(30:14) Aim to trigger different emotions.
(31:59) Create calls to action that stand out.
(35:23) Keep your list clean.
(38:00) Subject lines of the week.

Why is your click-through rate an important metric in email marketing? 

For several reasons, click-through rates are now more important than they’ve ever been. First of all, when someone clicks on the links in your emails, it gives them the ability to get to a page where they can find out more about how to put money in your pocket. Sure – sometimes you'll send them to a page where they can register for something (rather than buying). But these are the exceptions to the rule. 

The second reason why click-through rates matter is that, as time goes on, engagement shows Gmail and all the other platforms that your emails are important to people. It tells them they're of good quality and relevant. This is why we built a specific re-engagement campaign to keep people engaged – it's called the LOL Revival campaign and is available inside our programme.

Engagement is key. You have to determine whether someone is super engaged or has disengaged with your emails. Clicking on the links in our emails is a clear indicator they are, indeed, engaged. Technically, replying and forwarding your emails are better ways of engaging, but it’s hard to get people to do that regularly. So aiming for clicks is what you should do. 

Click-through rates and segmentation

Another reason why clicks are important is that they allow you to understand what each subscriber is interested in. You'll start to notice that every time you send an email about a certain topic and with a specific angle, some people will click on the links in those emails. But they might never engage with other angles. Why? Because different things work for different people. And monitoring those clicks is great for segmentation.

Be careful with segmentation, though. Don’t get too carried away by adding tags that are too specific. Try not to get too tag-happy, and only allocate tags that you’re going to use. Make sure you use clear links so that when people click on them, you know they're interested in a particular topic. So, for example, if you’re including a link that points to a resource about building your email list, make sure the link is something like “check out my list building course”. It shows a clear interest in that topic.

A great use of segmentation with link clicking is what we call a link pool. We use this in one of our campaigns, where we ask people to vote on what they're more interested in. This allows you to segment your subscribers efficiently because what they click on shows a higher level of intent. 

What is the average click-through rate in your industry? 

Average click-through rates can vary massively. Just like open rates and other kinds of engagement metrics, they are going to change over time and depend on what you're doing. First of all, click-through rates depend on how many opportunities you give someone to click on your links. If you’re only sending one email a week, and you only have one link in there, you're not giving people a lot of chances. But if you email your list 7 days a week, and you have at least one link in your emails (plus a bunch of other ones in your Super Signature), you’re giving someone plenty of opportunities to click on your links.

Also, when someone joins your list, you’re at the top of their consciousness. You can take advantage of the recency bias because you’re the most recent thing they’ve engaged with. Right now, they know your name. And for the first 60 days, you’re going to get the best open and click-through rates of your entire relationship with a subscriber. After that, those rates are going to reduce, especially if you’re continually sending people to the same product, which we call a robot offer. That's why for the first 60 days, we send people to different offers using our SCORE email engine. If by the end of that period, they haven’t bought, we know they had the best opportunity to do so. 

Throughout the various campaigns we send in this time, we talk about the same offer from different perspectives and in different ways. The offer is cloaked behind different bits of content, and our click-through rates are quite high – around 10-15%. They're higher than the industry averages because we present all our links in different ways. We're also continuously refreshing the person’s attention via the different campaigns.

Click-through rate average and daily emails 

After the initial 60 days, our subscribers start receiving our live daily emails, and our click-through rate drops to around 1%, which is completely normal. Why? First of all, in our daily emails, we’re almost always telling people exactly what the links are about. And they're mostly about our programme – The Email Hero Blueprint. By then, people have been around long enough to know what we sell, which is why these emails don't get a huge amount of clicks. 

But if we run a particular promotion for one week, for example, and change the content of our emails (and therefore our links), the click-through rate shoots up again. Typically, it'll be even higher than what we had in the first 60 days. And then we see it drop again when we go back to the daily live emails that talk about our core product. This is fine with us because the people who do click on the links in those emails, do it with a high level of intent. 

On average, our click-through rate is less than 5% – at around 2.62% across the board. This data includes the click-through rate we see in the first 60 days and then the long-term nurture sequence in the shape of our daily emails. We understand this data. And we know the reason for this is that we no longer churn out new campaigns for different products every 6-8 weeks like we used to do and recommend our students to do. If we did that, we’d see our average click-through rate increase significantly. We know that because we used to see this, and our members who use the same strategy have higher click-through rates when they sell different products. But we focus on just one thing, which explains our average click-through rate. 

Click-through rate fluctuations explained

Here are a few more details about what we do in our business. When someone joins our email list, they go through our Welcome sequence – the Getting to Know You sequence. For those 4 days, click-through rates are quite high. In fact, for the first couple of emails, we’re getting 80-90% open rates and high click-through rates. Then people go through our SCORE email engine, which takes up to 60 days for most people, and again, click-through rates are quite high at around 10-15%, depending on which bit of a campaign someone’s in.

If we’re gathering interest and showing people a lot of different things, our click-through rate tends to be a bit lower. But when our subscribers move into the conversion part of these campaigns, the click-through rate increases again because people now have real intent.

When they come out of the engine and continue to receive our daily emails, which 99% of the time talk about The Email Hero Blueprint, people start to become blind to it. They'll only click on the links if they want to find out more. And that means they have a certain level of intrigue or intent. 

On the other hand, when we run limited-time promotions, we tend to get a 90% open rate during the 7 days. And the same happens to click-through rates – they spike up!

Techniques to improve your average click-through rate

We suggest you try some of these techniques and see what works for you. You might even find that some of them don't work because your audience is used to a different style and approach from you. So carry out some split testing first.

It's also worth pointing out that if you find something that works for you, it might not work forever. For example, if your click-through rate improves because you used an emoji in your subject line, this might be a good technique for now but not forever. Because people might get tired of something or trends could change.

Also, sometimes higher click-through rates could be coincidental if you don’t have huge numbers of data. When we run tests, we will do it by sending something to 30% of our email list. 15% will get one version and the other 15% will get a different one. Once we've identified which one performed better, we then send it out to the remaining 70% of our list. That way, the majority of your list is going to see a slightly higher-performing version of an email. And if anything, it'll be the best one out of the two you put together.

Having said that, we don't think there is one thing that will always increase your click-through rate. Of course, having a link in your emails is always going to improve your click-through rate! But out of other minor strategies, because you can’t remove all bias, coincidence, and circumstances to get definitive data, we recommend you aim to find out what works today, rather than what will always work. 

1. Segment your audience

Segmenting your audience allows you to identify people with a higher level of intent in your products. For example, inside our programme, we have a bunch of different kinds of campaigns (like the Golden Cloak or the Daisy Chain) where we show people lots of different pieces of content. We pre-frame the content so that when someone clicks to watch it, we’re not only giving them value, but we're also measuring their intent around that topic.

So a great way to increase your click-through rate is to find the people who are interested in the angle you’re selling something from. In our world, if we’re using the angle that our SCORE email engine saves you time, we'll send all our conversion emails about the topic of time-saving. And that’s going to drive a much higher click-through rate because we know it’s the angle a certain person resonates with.

Segmentation is only true for now though. Because someone might be interested in saving time but also in simplifyinig things in their email marketing. And that angle may end up generating a higher conversion. So, when you segment your audience, make sure you've identified what they're interested in and don't send them content that's irrelevant to them. Because you won't get any clicks if you do!

2. Create a promotional strategy 

Don't just send emails out for the sake of keeping in touch with people. You want to have a strategy that allows you to sell. If you’re not showing up with something to sell (which means there’s going to be a call to action and a link to click on) then you’re not going to improve your click-through rate! Have a reason to email that has a promotional angle – you need to have a hook. In other words, give people reasons to buy. That’s why you need at least one clickable link in every single email you send.

There are probably only two or three times a year when we don’t send an email with a link. And even then, we still have our Super Signature at the bottom with a bunch of links in there. These emails without a direct link (which are few and far between) are often designed to increase the click-through rate. We use them to tell people that something’s coming the next day, for example. This gets them primed, ready, excited, and ready to click on what’s coming. We do that because we know that will increase our click-through rate. And you can probably see why we don’t do it all the time – because if you do anything too much, it stops working.

3. Aim to trigger different emotions

Not only do you want to include a call to action in every email, but you also want to make sure they’re clear and bold. You need to tap into different emotional motivating factors. Sometimes people will click because they buy into the benefit of what’s on the other side of a link. Other times, a link works because it generates blind curiosity.

We often refer to the first email in our campaigns as the one that plants the seed. If you’re inside our programme, you’ll have seen our SVVC campaign training – that’s what the S stands for (seed). You’re driving curiosity. These emails have the highest click-through rate and lowest intent, but they’re still high converting because these are hyperresponsive action-takers who click and bite faster – they don’t need a lot of seducing or FOMO, which will peak towards the end of a campaign. That’s when you ramp up the urgency and scarcity.

So make sure your calls to action trigger different emotions in your subscribers because not everyone is driven and motivated by the same things. Use a combination of factors – benefits, curiosity, FOMO, urgency, scarcity, etc. And remember that overusing anything is always going to reduce its effectiveness.

4. Create calls to action that stand out

Always make sure your links aren’t invisible! Instead, they need to be dazzling – use a blue old-fashioned underlined bit of text with a call to action that stands out in terms of how it looks and the words you choose.

Put the call to action on a separate line if you have to, or highlight it in a different colour. There are a bunch of ways you can dress up your links, and that’s what we give you in our resource called Click Tricks, which you can have for free. 

In terms of having more than one call to action, we’ll only add more if the email is quite long. And when we do, we'll try and do our links in different ways. 

5. Keep your list clean

Last but not least, a great way of increasing your open rates and click-through rates is to keep your list clean. Inside our programme, we give you the full approach and system to do this so you can clean up your list and get rid of the dud subscribers who have fallen asleep on the job and no longer read your emails. They damage your sender's reputation and stop you from getting your emails delivered to those who want to receive them.

One of the first things we encourage our students to do, especially if they have a low click-through rate as a percentage of their entire list, is to clean up their list so they can send their emails only to the people who are alive and kicking – i.e. those who still engage and are eager to learn from you.

To keep an eye on people who are disengaging, you need the right campaigns and strategies. If you want to use our engagement campaign to clean up your list and get access the exact emails we use to achieve a click-through rate increase, head over to The Email Hero Blueprint and check it out if you’re not already enrolled. It's everything you need to convert more of your subscribers into customers.

Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “Your unsubscribe rate.” It's quite cool because it sounds like you might be talking about the specific unsubscribe rates of the people on your list. And if they’ve been thinking about that topic themselves, this will feel quite timely.

So, whatever industry you’re in, pick something you know your audience is worried about and put ‘your’ in front of it. People will open the email because they want to know what it's all about. It grabs their attention, especially if it’s a topic they’ve been thinking about. And if they haven’t, now they’re aware of it. That means that as soon as they get into the email, they’ll want to read it. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

How To Create THE Most Successful Re-Engagement Email Campaign (And Smash Your Sales Targets).

Supercharge Your Email Marketing Copywriting By Mastering The Rule Of One For Maximum Impact.

How To Increase Your Open Rates (They’re Wrong But…).

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