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Did you know that emails are used by almost 50% of the world’s population and that the purchase decision is influenced by email marketing in 59% of eCommerce customers? (CaptainWords, 2022).
These significant statistics suggest that email marketing is an indispensable strategy that should be taken into consideration in the marketing plans of all eCommerce businesses. Its benefits include building awareness for your eCommerce brand, generating leads, optimizing conversion rate, boosting sales, increasing revenues, and others.
You are probably now wondering how you can measure the performance of your email marketing campaigns. Well, there are a few email marketing metrics for eCommerce that can get this job done. However, this article is going to focus on the Email Click Rate metric, also known as Email Click-Through Rate or CTR.
Read this article to know what is an email click rate, how it can be calculated, what is the average email click rate for eCommerce and what are the best strategies to increase it.
Table of Content:
- What is the email click rate for eCommerce?
- The average email click rate for eCommerce.
- How to calculate Email CTR?
- Types of email click-through rate.
- How to increase the email click rate for eCommerce businesses?
What is Email-Click-Rate For eCommerce?
The email click rate, also known as email click-through rate (CTR), is the number or percentage of email recipients who clicked on at least one link, call-to-action (CTA), or image in your email. It is a performance metric used to measure the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.
This general definition of email click rate does not differ whether we are talking about eCommerce or another type of business. However, what differs is the average email click rate for each industry.
What is a good email click rate for eCommerce?
According to Campaign Monitor, a good email click rate should range between 2% and 5%, and according to Oberlo, the average email click rate for eCommerce is 2.07%, which means that it is within the required range. However, if you want your eCommerce email marketing campaigns to perform really well, you should aim to reach an email click rate of 4%.
How To Calculate Email CTR?
Email CTR is calculated as follows:
The number of clicks on links in your email is divided by the total number of emails delivered, and then the result is multiplied by 100 to get a percentage.
Types of email click-through rate
There are mainly two different types of email click-through rates, which are equal in their importance; however, each one of them is more suitable for certain scenarios. Let us walk you through the differences between them.
It is important to mention that sometimes businesses use UCTR instead of TCTR because it avoids some of the noise caused by TCTR, such as:
- Users click on the same email’s links from multiple devices.
- Users click on the same email’s links multiple times.
Also, the use of these two types depends on the kind of email service provider (ESP) that you are using.
Top 10 Strategies To Increase The Email-click-rate For Ecommerce Businesses
If you want to boost the email click rate for your eCommerce business, here are some of the most effective strategies that you can follow:
1- Focus on target segmentation
What is the point of sending emails to people who are not interested in your offer? They might not even open your email, which will not only decrease your email click rate but your email open rate as well.
Research shows that segmented emails make recipients 50% more likely to click on links in the email, which means that they produce 50% more click-throughs than unsegmented emails (HelpScout, 2022)
Therefore you should allocate a lot of resources, time, and effort to target segmentation. Segmenting your mailing list is one of the very first strategies that you should use to increase the email click rate for your eCommerce business.
2- Include personalization
Email personalization goes hand in hand with email segmentation. We can even consider them two faces of the same coin. After you are done segmenting your mailing list into smaller groups based on their demographics, psychographics, and other criteria, it is time to customize your emails to appeal to each specific segment or even each individual user.
Research shows that 71% of customers expect to receive personalized content, and 76% feel a lot of frustration when this doesn’t happen (McKinsey & Company, 2022).
Also, statistics show that email personalization increases email click-through rates by around 139% (SuperOffice, 2022).
In order to be able to execute proper effective personalization, you need to learn as much information about the individuals you are targeting.
There are so many ways you can include personalization in your emails:
- Call them by their first name. For example, open your email with “Hello Sarah,...” instead of “Hello prospect,....”.
- Show them that you know what they do and where they work and that you are aware of their interests, preferences, hobbies, likes, and dislikes.
- Make them feel that they are special and that this email is customized especially for them.
Combining email segmentation with email personalization helps deliver the most relevant offers, which will increase the email click rate of your eCommerce store.
3- Choose the subject line and the preview text of your email wisely
The subject line and the preview text of your email also affect the email click rate of your eCommerce business; hence, you should choose them carefully.
To write a good subject line, here is what you can do:
- Keep it short so that it can be easily visible on mobile devices.
- Make sure it is relevant to the content of your email.
- Personalize your subject lines based on the information you know about your recipients. You can also mention your recipient’s first name in the email subject line. Research shows that emails that include the recipient’s first name have a 41% click-through rate and a 29% open rate (Zippia, 2022).
- Make your subject lines actionable but avoid using spammy words, such as “Act Now”.
- Avoid using a lot of exclamation marks, and avoid making spelling mistakes.
- Avoid using capital letters excessively because it gives the impression that you are yelling at the email recipients.
- Write email subject lines that stimulate the readers’ curiosity but do not do that at the expense of clarity. In other words, strike a balance between making it clear to the readers what the email is about and making them curious and eager to open the email and read more.
As for the preview text, also known as the preheader text, it is as important as the subject line in increasing your email click rate. It is a small line of text that appears near the subject line and it is probably the second thing that catches the readers’ eyes right after it.
You should know that if you don’t write the preview text of your emails, your email service provider (ESP) will do it for you, which might not end up as you wanted.
While writing your email preview texts, you can apply the same practices we mentioned regarding subject lines. However, there are a few other points that you should consider:
- Take into consideration that preview texts can contain up to 130 characters, which gives you a bigger space and a better opportunity to intrigue your readers and attract them to open your emails and click on the links inside them.
- Differentiate your preview text from your subject line. To better illustrate, do not repeat the same words mentioned in the subject line; instead, build on them and elaborate.
- Elaborate on what you want your readers to do.
- Incentives always entice readers to open emails and click on links; so try to mention discounts, offers, or free gifts in the preview text.
4- Put effort into choosing the right images and CTA
First, creating more than one call-to-action (CTA) might confuse your audience and result in them not taking any action at all. This is why you should always stick to one specific CTA throughout your subject lines, preview texts, and email content.
According to research, emails that contain only one call to action have increased click rates by 371% (Wordstream, 2021).
Here are a few tips that can help you create a CTA that increases the email click rate for your eCommerce business:
- Use action words that make it clear to your audience the exact kind of action that you want them to take.
- Make sure your CTA shows the value that people will be getting by clicking on it. The word “free” for example adds value to your CTA.
- Focus on the design of the CTA button, such as its colors, size, font of the text, and the place of the button within the email’s content.
Second, it is also important to put effort into choosing the right images to include in your emails. The images you choose should be relevant, consistent with your eCommerce brand’s message, appealing to your readers, and summarizes the content of your email.
According to an analysis done by Vero of 5000 email campaigns, in 2013, emails that contained images had 42% higher email click rates than emails without images.
5- Include buttons for social sharing
Social sharing buttons are crucial because sometimes, when your recipients are not interested in the offer in your email, they think about referring it to a friend who might be more interested. Social sharing buttons make it easier for them to do so.
According to research done by Get Response, in 2013, social sharing buttons increased email click rates by 158%.
6- Add a P.S. in your emails.
Adding a P.S., also known as a postscript, at the end of your email can be a great way to grab the attention of your email readers. Additionally, some readers may even skip the beginning and the middle of your email and go right to the end. Fortunately, P.S. sections give you an opportunity to get these readers to click even at the end of the email, which would contribute to the increase of your email click rate.
Research shows that 79% of email recipients read the P.S. first before reading anything else (Omnisend, 2021).
7- Optimize your emails for mobile commerce
Today, the market share of mobile commerce comprises 73% of the total eCommerce market (Zippia, 2022). Therefore, it is very important that you work on optimizing your emails for mobile devices.
What do you think happens when an individual opens the email you sent from a mobile device and finds it hard to read? Whatever your answer to that question is, I am sure it has nothing to do with increased email click rates.
Research by Invesp shows that emails that are optimized for mobile devices have a click rate that is 15% higher than non-optimized emails.
8- Pick your moment
Timing is a very crucial element if you want to increase the email click rate of your eCommerce business. To learn the best email-sending time, you should conduct a thorough research about your industry and your target audience, and you can also consider using surveys. This way, you will be able to send emails to your audience at the time that is most convenient for them.
9- Leverage FOMO marketing
FOMO marketing, also known as “Fear of missing out” marketing, is something that you can effectively leverage to increase the email click rate of your eCommerce business.
You can do this by always adding a sense of urgency and scarcity in your subject lines, preview texts, CTAs, and other parts of the email’s content.
10- Test, evaluate, and optimize your emails
Regular testing, evaluating, and optimizing is the secret behind every successful eCommerce business and it is, of course, one of the strategies than can help you increase email click rates. One type of test that you can use in evaluating your emails is the A/B testing.
There are many things that you can test in your email marketing campaign. For example, you can test your email subject line, preview text, CTA, images…etc.
Note: make sure that you always change only one variable in the A/B test, because if you change more than one variable, you will not be able to know which one of them caused the difference.
Final Thoughts:
Email click rate or click-through rate (CTR) is one of the important metrics that eCommerce marketers use to evaluate the performance of their eCommerce email marketing campaigns. The higher your email click rate, the more successful your eCommerce business will be. This is why you should start implementing all the previously discussed strategies to achieve the highest email click rate you can. However, to ensure the maximum effectiveness of these strategies, you should implement them using an automation tool.
Converted.in offers you a marketing automation tool that will make the whole process much easier for you through the following:
- Segment your target audience, which is the first strategy that can help you increase your email click rate.
- Create personalized emails for each target segment and each customer to make them feel special and increase the chances of them clicking on the links in your emails.
Book your Demo now and embark on this amazing journey!
