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Boosting Click Rates with the Right Creative
March 01, 2007
From the E-Business Newsletter
Good design may influence which cell phone or car customers choose, but what about which e-mail they open next? According to research by Silverpop, a permission-based e-mail marketing services firm, good creative can boost click rates by half. Here are e-mail design tips that can go a long way toward getting your e-mail marketing message heard.
1. Keep your brand in the subject line.
Business-to-consumer e-mails with the name of the brand or company in the subject line produced an average 29 percent open rate, compared with 22 percent without branding. Business-to-business results were even higher: branded subject lines produced a 32 percent open rate, versus 20 percent without.
2. Use of images should depend on your audience.
Images are more likely to generate a response in b-to-c e-mails, with image-rich messages producing a 7.1 percent average click-through rate, compared with a 4.7 percent click-through average for all-text b-to-c e-mails. In b-to-b, however, all-text e-mails worked better: They produced a 5.4 percent click rate, vs. a 3.5 percent rate from those that had both text and images.
3. Layout matters.
Surprisingly in b-to-b e-mails, the postcard-style format produced the highest click rate, 7.9 percent, compared with one-column or newsletter formats. But consumers prefer a newsletter-style format, which produced a 7.1 percent average click rate.
4. Don'’t get link happy.
Having too many links can actually lower your click rates. For b-to-b e-mails, having six to 10 links produced a 5.9 percent click rate; more than that, and the rate dropped to 4.3 percent. For b-to-c, six to 10 links produced a 7.6 percent click rate; with more than 10, that dropped to 6.6 percent.
5. Keep your call-to-action above the fold.
For both b-to-c and b-to-b marketers, putting your call-to-action above the fold (that is, not placing it toward the bottom of your e-mails, which would require the recipient to scroll down) improved click rates. This design choice worked especially well in b-to-b e-mails (6 percent above the fold click rate, vs. 2.5 percent below).
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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