Learn more from your click reports: improve CTR by 25%

Listen to the pitter patter of subscribers hitting your landing pages. Plip, plop, plip, plop...

Such a sweet sound to any email marketer. Like the first burst of rain after a drought, bringing new life to your response numbers.

How do you get more clicks? Well, test your emails to find what works best.

But here's a stat for you...

Average length of time between finishing up the email and sending it to the list: 4.32 minutes.

OK, I exaggerate, but how many of us really have everything ready far enough in advance to actually run some tests first?

How do we hard-pressed souls work out what's going to get us more clicks?

Some email marketing services now offer on-the-fly testing, where different versions go out to your list during a normal campaign send and the sending system monitors responses.

As soon as it identifies a winner, it only sends out that email to anyone not yet to receive a copy of your message.

Even then, you still need time to prepare the different versions and not everyone has access to this functionality anyway.

Use what you've got

A pragmatic alternative is to delve into the reports from previous email campaigns to find clues to what works best.

You probably review past reports to see what offers, topics or subject lines drive the most response. Which is fine, but...while these elements are very important, lots of other factors play a role, too.

For example, the call-to-action (CTA), number of competing CTAs, link position in the email, link position relative to other links, time of send, weekday of send, day of month of send, copy, copy length, copy structure, link color...the list goes on.

All might win you extra clicks if optimized.

Your reports can help you there, too...let's use my own example to walk through the process.

Doing the analysis

My informational newsletter features 3-5 article headlines, each accompanied by teaser text and a link to read the full article online.

How can I improve the layout of the teaser texts to get more clicks?

Step 1 was to draw up a list of some layout factors that might impact whether someone clicks on an article.

Step 2 was to go through six months' worth of campaign reports and build a spreadsheet: for each teaser found in an email, I documented the unique click-to-open rate and the value for each of the factors I wanted to investigate.

Here's what the spreadsheet looked like:



Now let's see what I learned about email copywriting and discuss the nuances.

Ideally, we'd do some kind of clever multivariate analysis on the results to pick out the winning combination of factors.

Unfortunately, I can barely spell multivariate analysis, let alone do one. So I kept it simple and relied on intuition to pick up clues...

Factor 1: How many links in the teaser text?

Reviewing past emails, I noticed that some article teasers included a single call-to-action at the end:



Others featured the end CTA, plus a link embedded in the teaser itself:



Lets do the math:

Average CTR when one link used: 6.81%
Average CTR when two links used: 8.57%

Adding that extra link to the teaser text improves clickthroughs to an article by an average 25.8%.

Now this isn't a statistically valid A/B test. So here's where intuition comes in.

Can we find a plausible explanation for that difference? And is there any other explanation for this improvement?

Intuitively, the extra link ought to attract more clicks. But playing with the numbers also showed that two-link teasers tend to appear higher up the email than one-click teasers. That might explain at least part of the response lift.

So we're already beginning to see the nuances of such an analysis...

For the future, I might broaden the teaser options. For example:

How about linking the headline to the landing page, a best practice recommended recently by the great Dave Chaffey.

Or how about setting the final CTA apart from the text, so it stands out more?

The possibilities are limited only by your imagination. But for now, let's hold on to the idea that an extra link does lift total clicks and move on...

Factor 2: Distance between links

Where the teaser featured both an in-content link and an end link, here's a graph showing how the distance between these two links related to the CTR for that article:



Now here's a tough one to call. But there's maybe a suggestion that the two links shouldn't be too far away from each other.

Perhaps greater "link intensity" has an impact on the willingness to click? Again, we're back to intuition. Is there a plausible explanation? Is there an alternative explanation?

For example, if the two links are far apart, the teaser text is likely to be longer than average. This in itself may be influencing clicks.

Might we also look at distance of the first link from the headline? Or the number of words in the teaser per link? Again, plenty of alternatives to potentially analyze.

The secret is to take a holistic view.

Look at each result and combine the insights with those from other factor analyses to build an overall picture.

It won't be perfect, and will likely have your neighborhood statistician tearing her hair out. But it will give you a starting point from which to work on making improvements. And future results will show you if you were right.

OK, the next post looks at some more factors...

Does the wording of the call-to-action matter? Does "keep reading" bring more clicks than "learn more?" And...does it matter which order articles appear in within the email?

This and more in the next post.

More on metrics and copywriting | Tags: email marketing, cta, email design

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