Practical Ways To Increase Click-Through Rate

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Episode 228 • 6th March 2024 • The Email Marketing Show • Email Marketing Heroes

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.

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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!

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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.

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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).

Unknown 0:18

Hey, it's Rob and Kennedy. Hello Today on the Email Marketing Show, we're talking about how you can increase your average click through rate in your email marketing. Speaking of click through rate, it's one of the most important things that we want to do right drive people to click on the links in our emails to go and check out offers, apply for a call, register for a webinar or buy a thing whatever it is that you want people to do, you need to get them clicking on those links. That's why we want to give you something really, really cool and we want to give it to you for free. Basically, it's a book list of 12 really creative ways. It's a book of 12. It's a book it's a report Alright, so I can easily say that of 12 really creative ways that you can get more clicks from every single email that you send, right but you can get it totally for free. It's called click tricks. All you have to do is head over to email marketing heroes.com forward slash tricks to download it now let's uh, podcasts and this one would have re edited that bit to make it sound seamless and professional, but we don't need any boost to our self confidence. So we're going to leave that crappy one in goes to email marketing irs.com/drinks He can't eat anything cherry flavoured is commonly ever discovered sample and he hates the sound of plates rubbing together. It's psychological mind reader Kennedy

Unknown 1:29

is that any taking help the sound of that material that plates are made out of like rubbing together finally clarity, clarity, clarity drives, if like waitstaff come and take plates away from you, quickly, clinically, horrible, horrible self interested. I could agree with you if they were like that sort of pinkish coloured clubs, material. I've only give you in Greece. When you put it in the cupboard, and I reckon there are plates you'd be perfectly satisfied with plastic ones a bit more glossy paper little bit like kids party blades with pictures of like, you know, Bob the Builder. Yeah, let's be honest enough to do it is you know, I don't like anything cherry flavoured either. In fact, I went to will be in the states quite a bit attended masterminds and speaking of stuff, I bought a bag of those Starburst and they've got bloody cherry ones in I know I did the same on America flight home from the Bahamas if he wants to go and stopped off grab some Starbucks original flavour i remember original flavour there were global fruits and we invented the exact American stop talking about with this other countries. So yeah, and yeah, there was lemon and strawberry perfectly happy with those orange That's the dream but where's the cherry one come from and it was in a there was a pink pack of pink paper one and there was a red paper one and I assumed the red paper one is the stupid nice it was gonna be the strawberry one and the pink paper one was gonna be the cherry one so I popped what I thought was the strawberry one and that was a Jerry one. Horrible, horrible I remember once I accidentally picked up some cherry coke because that a very similar label very similar than quite similar in the UK now the cool zero and the cherry one they can all be a bit or yeah, I'm gonna be on a bus on the way back from university dying for drink went into the Gregg's and I just I was like blood gloves I was like because just that flavour takes over your mouth like marzipan. Is the other one isn't it? Quite like onespan do yeah I don't I'm not big fan of the smell of cherry although Rachel did trip me up recently so I got in the car and all this new car for air freshener smells lovely when it's cherry gold. Here you go. Hello. Every single week on the show. We show you how to make more sales and more money. From the email subscribers that you've got. We talk about email marketing strategy, we talk about the psychology of email marketing the tactics and share what's working right now to make even more sales online making you the email marketing hero of your business with a brand new episode every Monday and Wednesday. Make sure that you hit the subscribe button on your podcast player. So let's talk about this. The click through rates are obviously super important. They're getting more important than they've ever been. And they're important for a bunch of reasons. So let's let's talk about that. First of all, obviously, when somebody clicks on your link, we've already said this when we mentioned electronics but we haven't really clicked on the links in your emails. They can physically have the ability to get to a page where they can find out more about how to put money in your pocket. With a few exceptions. Most of the time, you aren't gonna be selling stuff directly in your emails. Most of the time, you can be sending people to a thing and got the thing to sell them the thing or get to register for a thing and that's where you're selling the thing. Usually that's how it works. So that's the first one. But the second bit again, this is where this is getting more important than ever as time goes on. Is that engagement in your emails is important for showing Gmail and Yahoo and AOL and Verizon and whoever else there is that your emails are important to people and they are good quality and they are relevant, right? If you've got a bunch of people and we were talking about this this morning when we I years ago before we work together, I took the engagement measuring thing with a bit of a pinch of salt and I took it for a bit a bit of a pinch of salt. But when you could probably get away with that it was it was becoming important, but it wasn't hugely important. And because there was no good easy system for managing and maintaining engagement and keeping people engaged and putting them through a revival campaign if you need to and all that that's why we built one way there wasn't an easy way of doing it. There was streamlined and hands off. That's why we built one which if you're in our programmes, check out the LOL revival campaign and just follow through that. That's what you want to be doing that solves this problem. But it's like engage, you've got to have something for people to engage with in order to determine have they disengaged or are they super engaged? And the truth is that clicking on links in your emails is one of the best it certainly is. If you look at balance of good and easy to get people to do because like replying or forwarding your emails, they're technically better, but they're also hard to get people to do on a daily basis. Whereas so for a balancing good measure of engagement, good indication of engagement and easy to get people to do if you know you're doing clicks is the one to go for. And one of the things I think is really useful, above all of the technical stuff like that, with getting a lot of clickers. It's a really good way if you understanding what each individual subscriber is actually interested in. Yeah, so it's really good to know that you know what, every time I send an email about this kind of thing with this angle, this bunch of individual human beings seems to click the link in those emails and really liked it so that interested in that angle, whereas they never never engage in these other things. There's a bunch of people a different bunch of people perhaps maybe some overlap, who always engaged with a different angle. So it's really good for like segmentation but I don't want to get when I say that. I mean very careful that we don't want you to end up doing I think we've probably noticed before, when we first started using a decent email marketing platform that used tags, right, you get a little bit tag happy and you think that oh, I should tag when somebody clicked a link. I was probably targeting them with the fact that they were going to a video so I would put their interest in video then I would also tag them with, oh, it was about list building. So I've tagged him with a list building, but I would tag them with the fact it was in our town, you basically have all these different tags. And then would I use that information? No. Because if I've got another video I'm gonna send out to people. Am I going to exclude the people who haven't clicked the link to see a video before? No, because that is the conversion mechanism I've chosen. I'm never going to exclude people who are based on nothing. So don't feel like you have to get all tag happy. Monday, people who only click when it's Easter. I mean, and that's all we're doing. Like I said it's email out in the afternoon. So these are the afternoon people I mean, that afternoon people like in some weird Truman Show type film comes out the house of the badge on afternoon person is a morning person over there. It's 3pm. Let's get them back inside dragging his system. Get that morning person out of the Yeah, that's funny. That's funny. So, so don't go crazy over tagging people. But it does allow you to do some segmentation. If it's segmentation you're going to use for example, if for it to work a segmentation. The thing they click on has to be explicit. And I don't mean it has to be like Rob's nudes over here, you know. We don't want them as debuggers but it has to be very clear what's on the other side, the clicks. So for example, if you've got a sales page, about a list building course, for example, how to build your email list. The link could be go check out my list building course. You can then maybe think about going cool, that person's potentially has now engaged. They're interested in this kind of thing. But you wouldn't want the link to be like, Hey, I've got a brand new course coming out on Monday click here, go check it out. Because by clicking on that link, they're not telling you anything, they don't know anything in order to do that. So you can use what they click on to segment them. So that is a good use of it. A great use of segmentation with Link clicking is what we call a link pool and we use this in a lot of our campaigns, you'll have seen that we use this a lot of our campaigns where we have people vote on something and we'll say hey, for example. And that's a silly example. That's not from our industry. Very simple like in the fitness space. You might have the same person the same business might have a programme for weight loss and they might have a different programme for maybe like bodybuilding muscle gain type stuff, and they might have another one which has to do with let's say, recovery. Okay, maybe getting back into into recovering from some kind of injury or life event. Cool. In that email. You might go hey, just so I can serve you best which of these three things are you most interested in? Number one, losing some weight, and that's a link or a new line number two, build it building muscle. And then and then that's the link and then another third line with a number three, and it's it says recovering from an injury and getting back on your feet on either one of the things going to and that'll link now based on what they click there because there's a higher level of intent they're voting with their click. That's a great methodology for getting people to click. So saying nice things to Google that says please put this person's emails are good. We will click them. That's good. And but also have you actually using that click in a really proactive way. So some really, really important reasons to have people click that link. Yeah. So let's talk now we've sort of understood why this is important. Let's talk about through Well, first will actually just briefly talk about sort of average click through rates. This is a tricky one. But it will be a question that you've got in your brain probably so we'll talk about it briefly. Obviously, what I was gonna say is I think what's interesting, I was talking to me this morning about click through rates, and I just shared a story. So I'm not saying it was, it wasn't in the context. Of Consciousness, but we're talking about the fact that their click through rate was like, around 1%. And I said, when when is the click rate around 1%. And the reason we do that is because your click through rate, like your open rate, and like any kind of engagement is going to change over time and depend on what you're doing. So first of all, it's going to change depending on how many opportunities you've got somebody to give some your click. Like, if you have one opportunity in what only one of the emails you send out per week, and there's only one Lincoln nothing, then you're gonna get as many people clicking, because you're not gonna be 20 people to click losses, not many opportunities, whereas if you send email seven days a week, they've all got link, they've all got at least one link and plus maybe like a signature with a bunch of email, links in it, then you're gonna get more clicks. But but here's the thing, when somebody joins your email list, and you're the best thing since sliced bread, you're the thing like that that is on the top of their consciousness. You're, you have the recency bias, right, you're the most recent thing that they've they've engaged with, they know your name. For those first 60 days, you're gonna get the best open and click through rate of your entire relationship with the masses of people. After that it's going to deplete especially if you're sending people continuously to that same one, what we call a robot offer. So for 60 days, we know that for us, Rob for the first 60 days, we're selling people to different offers different things using our score email engine approach to talk about our main programme, the email hero blueprint. Yeah, if by the end of that they haven't bought they've had the best opportunity to buy nothing like that's all best emails. That's the whole point of the score email engine.

Unknown: 11:18

I'll just, I'll just hop in there briefly throughout those campaigns because we're talking about it all from such different perspectives in such different ways. cloaked behind different bits of content, the click through rates there are pretty high, right? So they do pretty well. They are as high as of 10 to 12 to 15% of people who are on the list not there's not people looking email lists of the people on the list, so they can be quite high even at the lowest end. They're higher than all the industry averages that we can also because we present all these links in different ways. And they've got different levels of intent. We're also like refreshing the person's attention throughout those campaigns. Right. That's really important. Those numbers with context for the next step. Sure, yeah. But then after that, after they graduate from that 60 days first 60 days relationship score range and with us now in our live what we call a broadcast segment, which is called a snowball emails, your live what you're sending today as being received today emails, the click through rate drops, and it drops quite a bit over that whole segment. And that makes sense and that is only normal. So what are we seeing on average? Rob Right them and if you're the person with the with your pulse on the numbers, so far, our day to day is sort of set at about 1%. But that's on the basis that a couple of things. First of all those emails are we almost always tell them what it is they're going to look at. So go and check out our programme, the blueprint, and it literally says those words and so they're only clicking knowing what they're looking at. It's rarely high intent. And even when it's a bit blind, like we say, you know, get everything you need. So we've finished the email and it is get everything you need to do this yourself here. People have been around our world long enough because we email every day they've they've by that point, they've been on our list for at least 60 days. They know what our stuff is generally until the email very, very much changes contacts. So for example, let's imagine that we've planned a particular promotion this particular week, and it isn't for our blueprint, it's for something else or we're doing our live event inbox or something else is happening. The context of the email changes, therefore they know that it's something different and therefore the click through rate shoots up again. And for the period of that week, we get really high click through rates like we did when they were in our engine. And then when we go back to the day to day email talking about a thing, it drops back down again. But that's fine, because again, we know that people aren't clicking when they when they are clicking, they're clicking with some level of intent. And the more they click, the more intent there is there. Which is why we do our Tell Me More campaign where if they click three times in a 60 day period, we know they're super interested, and we put them into a more intense sales campaign for that apparently a quarter some research that our team did, when we're talking about planning this episode. The team went away and came back with some interesting interesting data, which is most businesses who are talking to me the other businesses and stuff I see a click through rate on average are less than 5%. That's what they say. And the average is around 2.62% across the board. And that includes that average is also going to include what we're calling the email the score email engine, the numbers there and that's going to be lumped together as an average with with that longer term nurture as well. So that longer term, ongoing newsletter email, the reality is that we're we are in recent times have been quite lazy with our ongoing email marketing as in we don't churn out new campaigns for new products all the time. We're really focused on one cat one one product, and we're gonna do our daily emails to promote that product. If we were if we were doing what we really recommend or what we used to do, a lot of which is every four to six weeks, we create something new and run a campaign for it like a workshop or an event or something we're doing then we would see our average would be would be taken up a significant if we probably see that I mean I'm guessing Rob again, I'm gonna put on the spot if it's not the case just obviously just online Okay, fucking huge them. When we do something like our annual event inbox, or when we've got like something like that, I'm assuming that our level our click through rate takes a massive uptick Yeah, exactly. So whenever we do anything different if we did more of those things that are different, which we're gonna be doing because we're really focused on staying in our lane, then then then we've seen much higher click through rates. Likewise, our members have the blueprint and stuff like that they take our campaigns and a lot of a lot of our customers are much better than better at us than that using the campaigns to sell lots of different stuff. We just focus on one thing, but if you've got a bunch of stuff and you want to take those campaigns and use them then again your click through rate will be higher than ours is because against let's go for for contacting somebody opts into your email list. They go through your getting to your welcome sequence, we call ours the getting to know your sequence. And for those four days, our opens and clicks are very high. Like the first couple of emails, we're getting sort of 80 90% open rates and we get big numbers of clicks as well. Great. Then they go through our sales engineer score email engine, which will take up to about 60 days for most people. And again, in those the click through rates are pretty high. So they are sort of three, four or 510 15% depending on which bit of those campaigns they're in, if they're in a interested generation part where it's just about showing them lots of stuff and seeing what they click on then they're a bit lower. But when those people then move on into the conversion parts of those campaigns, they're very high because they've got real intent. They come out of the end of that engine, and now they continue to receive daily emails pretty much every day, largely 99% of the time just talking about the blueprint. Over time. The idea of that offer becomes tiring if you like and they become a blind to it and therefore they only click on those links if they want to go why is that again and then clicking with some level of intrigue or intent and then when we sporadically do something random like an event because it's different our click through rates spike up with that said of course what we do know is that because we in our in our day to day email because we email every day, in the same way that that grows our average open rate. So instead of getting 30% of the list, opening an email today, we'll get 90% of our list to open an email over the course of a seven day period, we effectively hack our way to a 90% open rate. The same thing happens with clicks right because those clicks cumulatively roll forward. So over an average seven day period we get quite a big amount of remember the number but quite a big percentage of our list to open an email to click on a link somewhere to something versus if we just did like a weekly newsletter with loads of links. And yeah, like, let's get into some techniques that you can improve your average emails sort of click through rate. Let's take a look. The first thing one of these don't want to do is test different stuff, right? You definitely want to test different things you want to we're gonna give you some of the stuff to actually test but the overarching thing is you're going to test some of the things we're about to talk about. And then you'll find some of those things will improve your click through rate. You're also going to find let's just be dead honest, some of these things will reduce your click through rate because your audience your approach the way you've trained them your relationship, your style. Your marketplace, doesn't jam with that approach. So definitely carry out some testing. You're even platform will be able to do a B testing, just through just go I'm gonna pick that week and for that week, I'm going to just test some of these things to see what I can do to improve click through and just choose a time and don't say I don't need to be constantly AV testing I think that's an unrealistic thing. That if you had a marketing person in your business, and it wasn't you, or if you had a marketing department at all, it was our job to figure out what works best or if that's how you're wired and you'd like to do it that way. And by all means split tests out of everything. But for most of us mere mortals where marketing is just one of the jobs we have to do is pick a week that's going to be a project for me while I'm doing that promotion, that other thing I'll do that whatever it is work on that project you're putting that week is just to run a bunch of tests. And I think it's interesting just to bear in mind the way that I think of split testing, we've never discussed this so this is interesting to get your take on I disagree. When I'm doing split testing of emails, I am not really looking to see I'm not looking to run a bunch of tests and then see quotes, what works. So I can always do that in future because my brain just can't figure out data that way. Instead, what so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna come out and say, Well, every time I use, well, two things. Let's imagine for example, every time I use an emoji in the subway lines, the click through rate went up and every time I didn't use an emoji in the story lines the click through rate went down, therefore, emojis increased click through rate because that might be true this week. It might not be true in a month it might be I'm gonna get tired after a while. Exactly. It might be true. Because it Yeah, so it can be it can get tight for two reasons. One, it gets tiring for the people and it becomes boring, but also just trends change and therefore that's not correct. Yeah, right. So that's, that's one thing but then the second part of that is that it may well be that that's fairly coincidental doesn't make huge we don't have a huge numbers of data. Even if you've got a list of 10s of 1000s of people in the grand scheme of significance is still not huge amounts of data. Instead, what I like to do is to seek to use the test to try and get the majority of the results from that email. I'm sending right now and then and vaguely vaguely satisfy my curiosity. So if I run a subject line test now say or run a test on the body of an email today, what we obviously the way we tend to do that is we want it to 30% of our lists or 15%. See one subject line 15% see another subject line that's 30% In total, and then the remaining words four or five hours and it looks for the winner in terms of which ones have the highest number of clicks, and then it sends that version out to the remaining 70% of the list where it might be 6040 or something like that. The reason I'm primarily in theory today, in a time that is relevant because it can't it's not gonna change very much. The majority of my list 70% are going to see a slightly higher performing version of an email or dramatically at what seems to be an even that's not flawless, by the way because it's not it's not a tonne of data and it's not a long time to get it in. But it's worth doing it because in theory what's happening is today within a timely manner, the majority of your list are seeing the best possible version of an email of the two that you put together. So I think it's important Some people probably do play the guru a little bit on thinking oh yes, I've studied the data really dramatically and discovered that if I do this, this always increases click through rate. Nothing always increases click through rate, I think sort of like like that sort of thing. So having a link is always gonna click improve the click through rate I want to get Yeah, but that little minor things we're testing so for me, I'm personally and there may be some of these things going I'm a data scientist, and I can absolutely analyse the data, remove all bias and remove all coincidence and remove all circumstance and get definitive data. I'm not that person. So and I don't think most people are so for me, it's how do you get the best result of that if this email you're sending today, and if you're if you're as nerdy as us then you might get a bit of a kick out of just finding out what works today. Yeah, yeah, I

Unknown: 20:23

like that. One of the other things I really think is important, we want to get more clicks is to we told our segmentation earlier, but what I really mean here is by segmentation, in this sort of part, the conversation is segment people who are most who have got a higher level of intent as long as what I'm trying to say. So, for example, we have a bunch of different kinds of campaigns. We've got one called a golden cloak, we've got one called a daisy chain got a whole like a whole bunch of different campaigns, where they work on the principle that we show you lots of different pieces of content. And we pre frame that bit of content so that when you go and watch that when you click to go watch that piece of content, we are not only giving you some give people some value, but we're also We're also measuring the intent around that thing. So a great way of increasing your click through rate is to find the people who are interested in that thing. So they're really interested in the angle that that you're selling this thing from and only email that angle to those people, right. So so for example, in our world, if we are going with the angle of our score, email engine saves you time, if that's the bit of content you send somebody to then all of the conversion emails they navigate that person's not going to see are all going to be about timesaving. We're going to want to drive a much higher click through rate because we know that's the angle the person has resonated with. And of course, here's a really important thing about the kind of segmentation that is only true for now. Because they also might they might be interested in how it's gonna save them time. But they might also be interested in how it's easier and actually how it's easier might be the more more higher conversion, emotion or reason as well. So make sure we're only email to the people who, who have got the chance or the ability to convert. So for example, if you've segmented your list, you know, there's a bunch of people who haven't even got started with what it is that you do yet. There's no point in trying to get any kind of clicks from people for your advanced super duper course. Right? Like I study. I'm learning to DJ as we talked about on the show, and you don't want to be sending people who just join your email list for like three tips you need to know before you start DJ and that's how I got on the email list. I don't want to be getting an email sequence that says Advanced beat matching and scratching. I mean like no I don't even know what beat bashing is, as well as my CD, scratch we say these, That'd be terrible. That's That's one. Another thing that's really, really important, I think is to make sure that you actually have a promotional strategy of what's going to be in those emails. And what I mean by that is, if you're just sending emails out that are just content, for the sake of content, just to keep in touch when people give value to show up and be the expert. That's not the model we're talking about here. We're talking about having a strategy that is promotional. We're talking about having a strategy for your email marketing that sells things. So if you're not showing up with something to sell, then which means there's gonna be a link in it right there's got to be a link has got to be a call to action in each of those emails. Then then you that's how you're going to really drive down your click through rate. I was looking at somebody's emails the other week and I remember they were like, Oh, my click through rates are low, actually, well, I'm on top of that conversion rate being low. This hasn't made many sales. I'm like, Okay, what's the what's the click through rate, and it wasn't very good. I was asking like your emails and it turns out it for this thing that we're doing, they're doing their own campaign about we use one of ours which is cool, because all of our stuffs about you know, giving you the tools as well as the campaigns to implement your techniques, but they just missed the boat on. I need to put a link in each of these emails. I need to have a reason email that has a promotional angle, it needs to have a hook. That is this is another reason to buy another reason to check out the sales video another reason to register for the webinar. Another reason that's what needs to be so make sure there is a call to action a clickable link at least one clickable link in pretty much every single email when I say pretty much every single one I'm talking about six out of seven use and every week I'm talking about 363 A year of them, there's only two or three times a year where we send an email that does not have a direct hago click this link and even the ones that don't, I've got an email signature in them, which has a bunch of links in them. So make sure a lot of the time those emails again, the few and far between are often designed to increase the click through rate of the email. That's coming tomorrow. So we're like getting people primed and ready and excited and sitting at their computer with their finger three inches above the above the mouse ready for the next day because we know that our click through rate will be higher than if we did that. And again, rarely do we do it because if you do that, so I think too much it stops working. And not only do you want to include a call to action in every email, it's going to be said but you also want to make sure that these are clear and bold call to actions, that driver click through different emotional motivating factors. So sometimes it might be because there's they can see the benefit of what's on the other side of that click, you know, you talk about the benefit of the programme or the benefit of the webinar or the benefit of the thing. Sometimes it works through blind curiosity, right. It's literally just a lot of the time that the first email of our campaigns is something that's been called the seed phase of the emails. If you're in our programmes, you might have seen our svbc campaign training but S stands for seed and it's literally just planting the seed laying their mind water and you just stand back and watch and that usually is driven through pure curiosity we get some of our highest clicks and lowest intent but still high converting if you know I mean, they're the hyper, hyper responsive action takers who just click and bike faster, they don't need a lot of a lot of seducing or fear of missing out so benefits curiosity fear of missing out towards the end of a campaign. When a campaign is on offer is closing. There's urgency, or if you only had 10 places and now there's only two available there's scarcity. So again, those are just a few of them. But you want to make sure that you've got your call to actions appeal to different benefits. You know, sometimes you want to watch a funny film. Sometimes you want to watch a sad film, sometimes you want to watch a scary film, we need to make sure that we're triggering different emotions in our subscribers. They don't always get driven by the same benefits that always get driven by curiosity. They don't always get driven by FOMO. You've got to use a combination of these things. Otherwise, over here if you use it too much or drop off right, overusing anything is what is going to reduce the effectiveness of that thing. Yeah, it definitely definitely is. And to make all of that work, you really have to make sure that your call to action really stands out so people can't miss them. And this is sometimes so easy to get wrong and not even not even notice what's going wrong. Because when we switched to all we were playing with or something we were doing something with another email platform anyway. And we sent that we highlight the thing, put the link in and we realised the email platform wasn't even underlining the text that was a link it wasn't making it a different colour. It was literally invisible. And I've seen that happen on like WordPress blog themes or stuff like that as well, but it's just not completely obvious. It's a link. It needs to be absolutely no doubt dazzling, so much so that if we put a image of like a screenshot from like a thumbnail from a video into an email, we know that some people wouldn't think to click on a picture of a video because I know you can't play videos and emails, right? Some people will and that's all intended to do with that. But that's why underneath those thumbnails, we always always always put a blue old fashioned underlined bit of text that says or click here to watch it now or some you know, some kind of text. You want to make sure that your call to action really stands out. You want to put it on its own line. Sometimes you want to make sure it's highlighted in different colours. That means change the colour of the font. The text itself to being like blue like a proper This is a link and a blue make your underlying people know you click on the line stuff. There's a whole bunch of ways you could dress up your links. In fact, that's exactly what that free report that Rob mentioned, you meant at the beginning of the beginning of the show. If you want your money heroes.com/tricks You'll see 12 different ways that we that we dress up links and they do stand out so they're on their own lines. So there's a mid sentence sometimes all these different things but how do you dress them up so that they are really draw people's eyes to them? You don't want the link in your email to be like a game of Where's Waldo? Where's Waldo? Like, that's not what you want. You want it to be? Oh, there is a link to click. This is why I'm going to click that thing and I know exactly where the damn link is. You don't want to hide the damn thing. And we use multiple links across this as well, which is one easy way of making the link stand out. Right? If you've got four of them, people are less likely to miss it then if there's one, so the longer an email gets, typically the more of these we'll put in, and then we'll do them in different ways. Again, you'll get some of those different ways from reading quick tricks. But for example, if one of them it might be a direct I'll give you two it might be click here to look at this and they'll literally have the instructions. But in other places in the same email, we'll just reference the product and we'll just link the name of the product. So you know we might say this video and link the words of this video. And then further down in the email say click here to watch the video and it's more of an instructive link. So again, you want to use multiple throughout it wherever you can towards the end of a campaign in the middle of a campaign, we often start putting things in the first lines on where so I made this video linked to this video. So again, as you go through this, you can again the longer the email gets so if it's like a four line or a three line one, your first email, you only need one link there but like as it gets longer and it's got testimonials and stuff in it. Then you want to start to put more links in put them above put them the bottom, effectively giving people too long didn't read approach without putting his words in specifically. So they have a link at the very top they can just get to quickly.

Unknown: 28:38

And you know the thing that is really a really great way of increasing your open rates and click through rates is keep your list clean. One of the very early things we do inside of email blueprint is give you our approach complete system to deploy your list. To clean up your list get rid of the duds subscribers who have fallen asleep on the job I no longer read your emails damaging your sender reputation stopping you getting your emails delivered to the ball really do want to receive them. And the reason it's one of the first things we do in the programme is if you've got a low click through rate as a percentage of your entire list, you've got 10,000 people but you know 9000 of them, hopefully not but if 9000 them are all asleep and have changed email addresses and no longer love you anymore. Then those out you're only gonna be able to possibly try and get clicks from that 1000 people and that's going to be bad for your sender reputation. So a great way of getting more clicks is to make sure you're only sending emails to people who are alive and kicking. You're still engaged, you're still eager to learn from you hear from you and know what it is that you've got going on. So keep that list clean. That's a really really important thing. Of course, to do a lot of this stuff, you can use automations you can you can use maybe some AI probably all to take a look at and keep an eye on people who are disengaging, what works, what doesn't do split testing. You don't have to do a lot of stuff manually. All of this stuff is built into your existing email platform. And you just need the campaigns and the strategy if you want our campaigns. If you want our engagement campaign to clean up your list, if you want our approaches our exact emails, even if you want to learn this stuff, you want to just have the emails which have all of these different ways of increasing your click through rate already built into them. You can just copy paste and send you can go to email hero blueprint.com If you're not already enrolled in our email hero blueprint, go to email hero blueprint.com You can get that you can get access to more than 45 Different complete that hundreds of emails, complete system every single email you'll ever need to send to convert more of your email subscribers into customers. So that's all of our email here. blueprint.com If you want to check it out, and you haven't already Wow, that was really interesting discussion. So there's a lot of that stuff. Recently Robert I said why don't we make our own private notes and bring our own ideas without sort of pre planning everything. So I thought was quite interesting to get into a discussion about it. All right, Rob, you've got a subject line of the week subject line of the week, haven't you? I have it the words your unsubscribe rate, full stop. It's quite cool because it sort of sounds like you might be talking about their unsubscribe rates specifically for the people on your list. You've been already thinking about their unsubscribe rate they're like well this is really timely I've been thinking about my unsubscribe rate the email itself a lot of people you know people that are marketers that like when speaking to something on people already do have on their mind exactly so but yeah, pick a thing that you know your audience are worried about and just put that in there your you know, unruly child or you know, whatever is gonna be if you can make it sound like it could be almost like your complaint or like, you know, in different contexts, they would read that as maybe a complaint or something that to be like sort of worried about and then they open email to find out what it is. And the opening line of that email was if your unsubscribe rate is higher than it than it you'd like it to be and everyone's needs. So if your child is playing up at dinner time more than you'd like them to be that kind of thing. Then if your weight is yo yoing up and down. Yeah, what it really does is it really directly uses a subject line to grab their attention even if they haven't been thinking about it, but that thing they are now because they're aware of what it means and as soon as they get in the opening line draws that down to read the rest of it. Like that's this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. Another fabulous episode we have a longer one that today because it's how to make it more of like a discussion and stuff. So hopefully you found it valuable if you did, let us know do send us a message or even better tag us on a social media post at Robin Kennedy on Instagram we'd love to see you listen to and if you haven't already, make sure you do hit Subscribe on your podcast player to make sure you don't miss next week's episode. We've got another great one planned for you. I would hate you to miss it. So if you hit subscribe to the podcast player, that means it'll automatically download your device and let you know with a notification new ones out next email marketing Wednesday. I will see you then. Cheers

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