Why aren’t my email marketing clicks very high? This is a question that comes up quite a bit, reads are great, the mailing list is all double opt-in, but why aren’t these converting into clicks?
For lots of people this can be a really tough one to get to the bottom of, because at first glance, everything looks to be in place. If the mailer looks great and it’s being sent to people who have asked to receive it, what’s going wrong?
Next up, we are going to explore why that might be.
The Call to Action isn’t visible enough
Up first we’ve got the main reason why reads don’t translate to clicks……the call to action.
Firstly we need to understand what a call to action is - this is your instruction for the viewer to do something after reading your email, often this will take the form of a button.
When people open up your email and start to read it - the call to action needs to really jump out at them, it needs to satisfy two goals: 1. Be instantly visible 2. Grab their attention
In order to make it instantly visible, it needs to be above the fold and not overshadowed by surrounding images. One of the biggest reasons why reads fail to convert is that people just don’t see the call to action quickly enough.
The other reason why people don’t see it is that there may be more than one call to action. It’s not uncommon to see lots of buttons asking people to do something - viewers can find this confusing and they may not see the one that you’d really like them to click on.
Trust hasn’t been built
Trust plays a really important part in the engagement, if viewers don’t yet recognise or trust the sender, then they won’t click on any links within.
Trust takes time to build, viewers need to be expecting your email and to instantly recognise your brand. If you are emailing new contacts, then it’s best to gradually introduce clickable links.
So, if you focus on keeping a well-maintained, opted-in list and if you present your brand in a way that people will recognise - then this will build trust, resulting in better clicks.
Poor Quality data
Whilst people may read your email, they may not click on any links if they aren’t the right target audience. It\s really important to make sure that everybody on your list is the right type of person. You can do this by deleting people who haven't engaged with your previous campaigns.
It’s worth also outlining exactly what they can expect to receive when they sign up to join your mailing list. This way, there are false expectations about content. People will then click on your links if it’s in line with what they were expecting to receive.
The offer isn’t compelling enough to convert
If viewers don’t find the link title interesting, or they think the offer isn’t great, then they won’t click on it. Sometimes, it’s hard to get this right, it might not be the strength of the offer itself - it might be that worlds that you’ve used in either the strap-line or the link title.
The best way to really make sure that your offer works, is to use split testing - this is where you test different variants to small sections of your database. The results of this will quickly show a favourite with your target audience.
Your design isn’t optimised for mobile
With more and more of us viewing emails on mobile devices instead of desktop devices, then it’s now more important than ever to make sure that your design translates to the smaller screen.
If your call to action looks great on the desktop screen that it was designed on, on mobile it may be too small and pushed too far down the screen. This is quite a common reason for reads not converting into clicks.
Summary
Ok, that’s our top five reasons why your email marketing reads may fail to convert to clicks. Hopefully, you’ve learnt something useful from this video to try in your next email marketing campaign.