How to Improve Your Email Open Rate and Click-Through Rate

An email’s open rate and click-through rate are two metrics that can tell you a lot about the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Additionally, they can be indicators of a company’s overall success. Understanding these two metrics allows you to measure how effectively emails are driving engagement and resonating with your audience. If your company’s emails are suffering from low open rates or low click-through rates, read on to learn how to remedy the situation.

Open Rate

An email’s open rate is the percentage of people who opened it out of the total number of people it was sent to. What is considered to be a good open rate varies from industry to industry. A high open rate typically means that your email’s subject line is relevant and compelling, therefore enticing its recipients to open the email. Conversely, a low open rate typically means that your subject line is not catching your audience’s attention. If your emails have a low open rate, there are a couple of actions you can take to increase it. 

1. Redo Your Subject Line:

An email’s subject line is often what makes a consumer decide whether or not they are going to open the email. Therefore, it needs to be descriptive, and draw your audience in. The email’s subject line needs to be short enough to be displayed in full. Do not let the end of it get cut off. You should personalize the subject line by including the recipient’s name. Additionally, you should utilize A/B testing to identify what resonates best with your audience.

2. Make Yourself Known:

Consumers don’t want to open an email if they don’t know who it is from. Ensure that your email clearly shows it was sent from you by setting the sender name to your company’s name, rather than your company’s email address. The sender name should appear the same way on every email you send so consumers can recognize it.

Click-Through Rate

An email’s click-through rate is the percentage of people who clicked on a link in the email out of the total number of people who opened the email. Although they sound similar, an email’s click-through rate is not the same thing as an email’s click rate. Do not confuse the two. An email’s click rate is the percentage of people who clicked a link in the email out of the total number of people the email was delivered to.

Similarly to an email’s open rate, what is considered to be a good click-through rate varies from industry to industry. A high click-through rate typically means that your email is successful in persuading readers to take the desired action. The desired action can be making a purchase, downloading an eBook, signing up to attend a webinar, etc. Conversely, a low click-through rate likely means that your email’s call-to-action isn’t compelling, or that the email itself is not engaging. If your email has a low click-through rate, here are some ways you can increase it:

1. Make Your Email Visually Appealing:

Consumers often find cluttered emails to be overwhelming. Keeping your emails simple makes them visually appealing. Additionally, it makes your email more readable, and makes your call-to-action easier to find. Another aspect of making sure that your emails are visually appealing is making sure that your emails are mobile-friendly, since more and more people are accessing their email accounts on their mobile devices in this day and age.

2. Make Your Call-To-Action Clear:

Your call-to-action’s existence and purpose should both be clear. Visually, your call-to-action should be easy to find in your email. You can achieve a prominent call-to-action by using bold fonts and contrasting colors. In addition to being easy to find, your call-to-action needs to tell readers what to do. It should use action words like “watch,” “subscribe,” “read,” or “download” to guide readers on what they should do next. Using this kind of language consequently creates a sense of importance and urgency that motivates the email’s recipients to immediately engage and click on the call-to-action.

Tracking, reviewing, and analyzing your email’s open rate and click-through rate are all essential to the improvement of your email marketing campaigns and therefore your overall company success. Use the 4 tips given above to increase your emails’ open rates and click-through rates.