6 Tips to Increase the Click through Rates of Your Marketing Emails

The advent of the internet had changed the business landscape altogether. Now, almost every business needs to have an online presence to perform better. And that’s not all. If you have a business, you need to engage in online marketing as well. Take my word for it.

So, how do you do it?

There are a number of easy steps that you can implement in your email marketing campaigns. And I can assure you, they are sure to fetch excellent results. These will increase the clicks rates for your emails and thus, will play a major role in taking your email marketing endeavors a step forward.

Here’s a quick look at the steps you can implement to maximize clicks on your emails.

Keep the Subject Line Perfect

The subject line! Well, that’s the first thing of your email marketing campaign that will catch the attention of your target audience. And it should have all the qualities to stand out in the crowd of hundreds of emails that she may have in her inbox.

An attractive subject line will surely drive the receivers of your email to open and go through it. So, take your time and decide a subject line that is sure to make the receivers feel interested to open it. Keep the subject line 50 characters or less. Adding the name of some person might not be helpful. But it has been observed that adding the name of a place plays a major role in driving the open rate up.

Help Solve Some Problem

Ask a question to yourself: what kinds of marketing emails do you open most? If you knew that an email from a certain source will help you solve some of the problems you are having, won’t you always open it? The same holds true for your audience as well.

Along with your marketing components, the links to your website and others, try to send solutions to some of the common difficulties they might face in their businesses. An example in this case is Quibb. The company’s approach has helped them gain an email open rate between 50% and 70%. This is really amazing, much above the average email open rate in North America.

Try to make your marketing email look customized for the reader. Write as if you are speaking to only one person. But remember, never be overtly promotional.

Know the Right Time

When do you send the emails to your target audience? In the middle of the night? It’s true the email remains in the inbox and she can open it later as well. But in most of the cases, the emails sent earlier are never opened. So, you need to know the right time to send the emails. Researches show that emails sent on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the most opened ones. So, choose any of these days. Do a bit of research to know what the most likely time for your potential customers to remain active is. Send during that time to achieve the best results.

Create Your Own Description for Each Mail

Almost in every mail, the reader usually is able to see the subject and a little more than that. The preview text, which is an introduction to the mail, is present just below the subject line. As the name suggests, this line will contain a few lines on the subject that the mail conveys. Thus, people will be able to see what’s there in your mail. And if they are interested, they will surely open it. And keep it short and simple, preferably within 50 characters.

Here’s how such an introduction (on the right side of the subject) will look like in Gmail, the email client of Google:

[Image Courtesy: http://cdn-static.zdnet.com/i/story/61/48/002153/gmail-inbox-5436-andrewmagergmailcom.jpg]

On the contrary, if you don’t set an introduction to the mail, a few words from the body are automatically pulled and set for preview. They hardly make any sense and hence, has every chance of deterring a target customer from opening the mail.

Include Attractive Images in the Email

Why are you performing your email marketing? What do you want to achieve through it? For most of the businesses, the primary objective is to make the readers visit their website. So, you need to send the link of that website to your readers. But adding too many links in a single email, scattering it here and there, will just make it look clumsy. Don’t you think readers would, in turn, move away from a clumsy email?

So, what can you do to solve this? An easy way out is to use images in the email. Add a catchy subject line. And along with it, attach an excellent image that will attract the viewers. Insert the link of your website to the image. So, whenever any viewer clicks on the image, she will be directed to your website.

Fit in the Social Sharing Buttons

What’s an easy way to increase clicks for your email? Surely you can do it by sharing the email. And ensure that people who receive it can share it easily as well, provided they like it. The forward option will surely be there. Moreover, integrate the social sharing buttons. You should also add a readymade email forwarding option, which will make it easier for the readers to share the email. This, in turn, will increase the click through rates. You can also add clearly visible call-to-action buttons in the email.

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4 Tactics to Improve Your Daily Social Media Marketing Routine

#1: Add Credibility With Real-Time Sharing

In addition to creating and publishing content and engaging with your audience on social media, it’s important to keep up with trends in your industry.

There may be an important conference or breaking news within your niche that your audience needs to know about. Being the first to tell them helps build your company’s credibility.

To make sure you don’t miss the important information your audience needs to know, you can use Google Alerts and Brook.

Google Alerts make it easy to keep tabs on everyone else.

Google Alerts are easy to set up and configure. Just choose which search terms are most important to you (e.g., specific topics or events), complete the form and choose how often you’ll receive email updates.

You can set up as many alerts as you want, but if you’re just starting out I suggest sticking to two or three queries.

You may need to tailor a query a bit more to get the kind of information you want, or you may need to change how often you’re receiving alerts.

Once you have your system down, set up alerts for influencers in your industry, one for your competitors and one for mentions of your top-ranking keywords to see other related content people are sharing.

Another way you can keep up with trends in your industry is through the third-party Twitter tool Brook. It gives you a daily digest of the five best tweets from people you want to keep tabs on.

Use Brook to find real-time information on important issues.

When you first use Brook, it gives you recommendations on people you may know or want to follow. Carefully choose folks on Twitter who are important to your industry and regularly update with the kind of content you’d search for.

Keep in mind you’re using this tool to focus on real-time trends in your industry.

#2: Maximize Reach With Reshared Content

Your RSS feeds and Pocket can definitely help you take control of your curated content. But are you getting the most out of that content?

If you’re only sharing via social channels once, you’re missing out on new traffic to your site. Here’s an infographic from KISSmetrics on how multiple shares of one piece of content can impact how well that content performs.

Share and share again for best results.

When you share your newest content via social channels, change how you present it. Position it several different ways by adding a question or using a particularly interesting stat or snippet from whatever you’re linking to.

And find ways to share relevant content created by thought leaders in your industry, your peers and even your customers.

#3: Save Time With Automated Curation

Creating and finding relevant, interesting content is time-consuming, don’t you agree? I have two ideas on how you can optimize this process: RSS feeds and Pocket.

RSS lists are a useful way to gather great content from industry-specific websites I trust. RSS feeds bring that content to me so I don’t have to remember to go looking for it. I use Feedly to create my lists.

When you create a Feedly account, you can type in a search term that’s related to your business, and you can add any of the returned results to your Feedly RSS feed. In the example below, I typed in “social media.”

RSS brings shareable content to you as it’s available.

Now you have a running list of websites you can browse, read and pull content from to share to with your audience.

Of course, RSS isn’t the only way you’ll find content. As you read your own social profiles, you’re likely to find articles worth sharing, but it may not be the right time to share them (e.g., they may fit with an upcoming series on your editorial calendar).

In those cases you want to save the article for later. You can do that with an app like Pocket, which lets you save links in a central place.

Pocket keeps track of content for you.

Apps like Pocket give you a lot of flexibility in ways to store articles. For example, you can email links to your Pocket account or install browser plugins for one-click storage.

A lot of apps like Pocket are also integrated with services like Twitter so you can easily save content no matter where you are on the Internet.

#4: Get More Clicks With Optimized Updates

Are you optimizing your content for each social network you market on? If you’re not taking full advantage of the publishing nuances of each network, you’re probably missing the part of your audience you want to market to most.

Here are some examples of how you can get the performance you want from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

Twitter’s inline images make your tweets instantly more appealing and clickable, getting more out of your 140 characters than ever before. If you aren’t already, now is a good time to start using Twitter cards.

Snag attention in the Twitter feed with inline images.

Visual content is the crux of success on both Twitter and Facebook. Catching someone’s eye is the best way to get him or her to click through or share your content.

Facebook allots even more space to visual content than Twitter. Facebook users see larger versions of pictures, images and video.

Your business Facebook page works very well as a conduit for sharing your YouTube channel. Share compelling videos that provide important niche information, or better yet, entertaining content promoting your products or your company to encourage more clicks.

Videos are a good way to share important information.

When you embed a video in a Facebook update, your audience can watch it directly in their stream. They appreciate not being forced to another site to watch the video.

Twitter and Facebook aren’t good places for over-promotion. Your audience doesn’t care for it and may stop coming by for information.

Since LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, it’s really the place where marketers like you can talk about your company on a company page without sounding too self-promotional.

It’s more acceptable to self-promote on LinkedIn.

Your LinkedIn company page is where you should be putting any important company updates.

Not all of your content is relevant to each person in your audience. Google+ circles let you create tailored updates and share those updates with specific people or circles.

Google+ is ripe with opportunities to segment posts for different audiences.

Marketing directly to a smaller targeted audience can lead to much more interaction and even sales.

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Boosting Your Click-Through Rate: Standing Out in Google Search

Everyone from businesses to bloggers are scrambling left and right to find out the best ways to push their site to the top of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Why? Because Internet users usually only check out the first few pages of results. This means that your click-through rate is drastically lessened if you don’t show up in these first few pages. But to make it up there, you’ll need to comply with a few different factors that Google considers.

So if you want to make it to the top, follow these useful tips:

Take Advantage of Site links

Site links are links for pages from within your site that appear under your site’s initial domain listing. A site link can be generated by Google if your site is simple enough to navigate and has a simple structure. So the first step to getting site links is by making sure your site can be easily navigated by Google. If you do a search for a website on Google, you’ll find that site links generally lead to some of its more popular or useful pages, and each site link has a description of about 60 characters.

So how do you increase the chances of getting site links? First, you need to set up a Webmaster account for your site so that you can submit your URL and site map in order to be reconsidered for a site link. Google will reconsider whether or not your site deserves a site link. In the 24-hour waiting process, you can do the following to get better chances of consideration:

• Get rid of broken links, HTML errors, and CSS errors in your site. There are lots of services that can help you find these in your site so you can revise or remove them.

• Make sure you have great content. Content farms don’t cut it. Content that has high engagement, lots of detail and links in other sites have a higher chance of getting a sitelink.

• Drive a high percentage of links from other sites to a particular page in your site. For instance, in a series of pages about online games, link to a page that discusses one game in particular.

Optimize Pages to Get Dual Rankings

There may be times when you make a search query, but you see two results from the same domain. This isn’t a glitch in the search engine. In fact, Google puts two results from the same domain right next to each other when they’re on the same SERP. The technique to getting two or more links from your site may be a bit tricky, but it pays off.

For instance your site is at #7 on the first SERP, and another link from your site is the 4th result on the second page. By optimizing the second link just enough to make it get to the first page, this result is automatically bumped up to #8 so it’s next to your higher ranking search result. So how can you optimize the lower ranking result?

• Slightly imitate the higher search result in terms of its header’s keyword placement and the actual content. However, don’t create an exact copy of the content. Make it unique enough to give it a different feel, but similar enough to be just as effective at getting a higher ranking.

• Update other pages in your site to link to the lower ranking page through the use of keyword-rich anchor text. Find pages in your site that are related to the lower ranking page, and revise the content in those pages to include a link to the lower ranking page.

• Links from outside your website that lead to the lower ranking page are also effective. You can do this through guest posts on other pages or through social media sites that share links, such as Pinterest.

Work on Your Meta-description

A meta-description is the text you see below the link of a search result. This text is composed of 160 characters, and its main purpose is to give readers a hint of what they’ll find out in your site. It’s also a great tactic to make your site stand out from all the other search results. Think of it as a teaser text to persuade readers to click your link and get more information from your site.

A convincing call to action helps increase the effectiveness of your meta-description. Instead of using passive or merely wordy descriptions, try the following:

• Begin your meta-description with “Check out why…” or “Find out why…”

• End your meta-description with “Learn more…” or “Read about it here.”

• Use questions that make users think like “Have you ever wondered…” or “Did you know that…”

Keywords also factor into how relevant your site is to the user’s search query. If you would notice, the search keywords are highlighted in the search results, and this draws in more attention to your page. In addition to great phrasing, cliffhangers can also convince users to click the link to your site. It adds suspense and makes users more curious. Use something like “You’ll never guess his reply!” or “You’ll be shocked by the results.”

Use Rich Snippets

Rich snippets make it easier for users to understand what’s on a page by summarizing the content of the page in the search results. However, your content must be in a certain format for it to be supported by rich snippets. This format is highly particular about design, technicalities, and quality. It’s worth a development investment if you’re intent on getting to the top of Google’s SERP. Google’s Webmaster Help Center can give you an in-depth guide for how you can start taking advantage of rich snippets.

Don’t be intimidated by all of the listings that are currently high up on the SERPs. With these tips, you can very well make it up there too!

To improve your click-through rate, you need to make sure that you’re out there for the world to see. In this case, you can do so by showing up earlier in SERPs. By using these strategies and producing valuable content for your site, it will not only help it get to the top of the search results page, but also at the top of all the relevant listings too! Although only two of these techniques should suffice when it comes to boosting your ranking and getting a higher click-through rate, think of all the possibilities if you tried all four of them!

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