Links can be the holy grail to getting your email subscribers to complete the actions you want. To reach your email goals you need to drive action and guide your subscribers so that they always know what you want them to do next. This being said, have you considered how you are incorporating your links into your campaigns?
Links are often overlooked as a crucial design and functional element of email marketing campaigns.
Click-through rates are a great metric to use when you are wanting to see how engaged your audience is with your content. If you’re noticing a slow, steady decline in your click-through rates or you just want to improve your current click through rate - this is the article for you.
There are many reasons why a subscriber might not click on your links and in turn there are also a myriad of things you can do to nudge your subscribers to click. We’ll take a deep dive into why no-one is clicking on your links and what you can do about it.
One of the things that contribute to subscribers not clicking on links is when email marketers use too much copy. This is especially true when your email campaigns make use of hyperlinks. Having too much copy means that subscribers who scan your email content don’t always realise that you have added links into the content.
An email is not a blog post and therefore shouldn’t be treated as such. Your email should drive traffic to relevant content or areas on your website and therefore should offer enough copy in the email to entice a reader to click on a link and find out more.
Make sure when you are writing your email copy that you keep the copy clear and concise. This will ensure that your links stand out and don’t get lost in the content.
Links are often placed in button format or calls to action, but that doesn’t mean they need to be boring. Using “click here” as a call to action might be discouraging subscribers from clicking on these carefully placed buttons. This is because they’re actually just boring. Using more descriptive text for your links can see you getting better results because they are more attractive to subscribers.
Instead of using “click here” use words that describe what’s next for the subscriber. A great example is using the words “I want to win” if you are running a competition or giveaway that you want to get your subscribers to enter.
Just like you are able to customize every aspect of your email design, you can customize the colours of your links. A big mistake we see email marketers make is using incompatible colours for their links. This is generally in the form of:
There’s absolutely nothing worse than clicking on a button and you land somewhere completely random or on a page that doesn’t exist. Don’t stress though, you’ll find no judgement from our side (it’s even happened to us). A series of broken or misleading links are one of the main reasons why people don’t click on all the links within a campaign.
Making sure your links work and direct a subscriber to the intended destination is crucial to your email marketing success. You need to make sure that you do some extensive testing and that your website can manage a large influx of visitors at once (especially if you have a large list).
One of the things you should also do is to have someone look at your campaign before you send it out and see how they interact with the campaign. Do they know where to click and what to do next? If the answer is no, then you should make adjustments to your campaigns.
When you haven’t set a clear email objective for your campaign, people might not click on your links because your email is all over the place. Not having a focused campaign can lead to confusion and poor email results. Email subscribers want to have a good experience with your brand on all levels, unclear campaigns make that impossible.
When you’re crafting your email campaigns you need to make sure that you know your main “WHY’s.”
If you receive an email and click on a link that takes you somewhere you didn’t expect it to go, do you click on any other links in the campaign? I’m guessing you don’t. Links should match the content in the email campaign. You don’t want to have URLs in your campaigns that don’t match the URL associated with your email send. These links may make it look like you are running a phishing campaign which will damage your brand’s reputation.
Links should also clearly illustrate their end destination in how the link is formatted. A well formatted link is illustrated in the example below: https://www.mailblaze.com/thinkings/email-checklist-download
When using a structure like the above, the link should actually link to a download page for an asset. In this case an email checklist. You can make your end destination clear by naming your links well but also by using descriptive link buttons.
Are you making some of these link related mistakes mentioned above? Let us know in the comments if you’ll be incorporating some of the recommendations in the article.
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