Email Response: Click-Through Rates

Once you've got the email delivered and opened, the next step to maximise response rates is to get the recipient to click.

Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of people that click after opening the email (ie. unique clicks per 100 email opens).

The table below shows how your click-through rate affects your overall response rate and the number of leads/sales you generate:

Emails	Opens		Click-Throughs		Response	Conversion
Emails delivered	Open rate	Opens	CTR	Unique Clicks	Response rate	Conversion rate	No. of Leads/Sales
10,000	30%	3,000	10%	300	3.0%	3%	9
10,000	30%	3,000	15%	450	4.5%	3%	13.5
10,000	30%	3,000	20%	600	6.0%	3%	18
10,000	30%	3,000	25%	750	7.5%	3%	22.5
10,000	30%	3,000	30%	900	9.0%	3%	27
Source: EmailTools.co.uk

=> A 20% click-through rate generates 33% more leads/sales than a 15% click-through rate.

The 4 Factors That Affect CTR:

As in telemarketing, the relative importance of target audience, offer and execution is 6:3:1 -- it's essential to know exactly who you're talking to!

1. List quality

As mentioned previously, your email marketing campaign is only as good as your list.

The more recent the data, the better the quality of the list.

2. Target audience (demographics)

Who is your target audience?

The best offer in the world sent to the wrong demographic audience will get a poor response.

3. Offer

A strong compelling offer is essential to generate high response rates. And it needs to be tailored to your target audience.

CEO's want different information from the IT exec, etc - you need to know exactly who you are sending to.

Attention spans are short - always lead with your strongest or most important information first.

4. Creative

Text v HTML:

Most business users use Outlook, so HTML is often the format of choice for permission-based email marketers.

B2B direct email: 87% use HTML, 9% use text, 4% use rich-media.
B2B e-newsletters: 57% HTML, 39% text, 4% rich-media
[Source: Opt-in News 2003]

There are 3 major benefits that HTML has over text:
- links displayed can be much shorter (eg "click here")
- HTML email often gets better response rates
- you can get additional tracking data (open rates)

And one major disadvantage:
- HTML emails are often done so poorly that the email ends up being unreadable!

Another disadvantage of HTML is that support for HTML is dependent on the recipient's email client. Email clients do NOT have the same capabilities as a full-featured web-browser. And many email broadcasting software programmes don't send email in multi-part MIME format (where a text alternative to HTML is included in your message) which further compounds the problem.

Also see, Email Client HTML Capability Chart.

It is also important to note that if you are mailing to a corporate network, many system administrators will strip HTML from your message (or block it completely), so it is essential that your mailing software supports multi-part MIME format. You may want to stick with plain text in these instances.

Unlike HTML, poorly formatted plain text messages are still readable. A poorly formatted text email looks like this:

      Thank you for requesting information
      about our
      services. The staff at XYZ Company
      would like
      to thank all our customers…

There are two reasons why email messages may turn out looking like the above:

1. Line length
When composing email, most people just type without using a hard carriage return. If it looks fine when you're done, your email program probably automatically wraps the words.

2. Proportional character fonts
There are fixed-pitch fonts (Courier) and proportional spaced fonts (Verdana). With fixed-pitch fonts, all characters in a paragraph line up directly above each other. With proportional-spaced fonts, CAPS, space bars and other keystrokes are wider, so each line becomes a different length.

By using fixed-pitch fonts (Courier), and a hard carriage return at the end of each line at 60-65 characters, you can avoid the formatting problem shown above.

Rich-Media:
Although most business users have broadband, it is not recommended that you send rich-media emails (emails that contain Flash, audio, etc) since rich-media is dependent on plug-ins and scripting support - there is no guarantee that they will display as intended. In fact, it's pretty unlikely.

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