How to Increase Click-through Rate in Your Emails

I got this question from one of my readers when I did the teleseminar last weekend. And I thought it’s an interesting one. He asked, “Kidino, how do you increase click through rates in your emails?”

And here’s my answer …

Before you think about increasing click-through rates, you need to have two things.

1 – you need to make sure your emails get delivered
2 – you need to make sure your emails get opened

Let’s tackle these two issues first. The number one reason why emails don’t arrive in the Inbox is spam filters. First reason why emails get caught in spam filters is your email content. Now, maybe you’ve heard about people changing the way they type their emails. For example, they type fr/ee for free, or muney for money.

Let me tell you this — I don’t do that. Gary Ambrose (owner of EmailAces.com) said to Keith Wellman in the interview in TheListFX.com, companies like Citibank, Microsoft, financial institutions, insurance companies … they all use emails too. And they don’t substitute words like that. They don’t change money to muney. And their emails still get delivered. So if you are avoiding it, sooner or later, the spam filters will learn about it.

To me, I just write the normal way I write. And just to make sure, I my email content with a spam trigger checker. I use SiteSell.com at http://spamcheck.sitesell.com. If my email scores 0.5 or below, then I am fine. You can also send your email to spamcheck@sitesell.net. You should get an autoresponse email with the result of your email.

Next is making sure that you IP is not blacklisted. And here’s why I like using a third party company that specializes in email marketing like Aweber.com or EmailAces.com. These people work hard to make sure that emails of their customers really get delivered. They make sure that their IPs are not blacklisted. And they take action when their IPs get blacklisted.

On the other hand, you may be running your own script on your web hosting. But do you when your IP gets blacklisted? Do you know how to get your IP off the blacklisted list? Do you know how much you have to spend to get it off the list? Sometimes it’s not your fault. Because your own a shared hosting, you share the same IP address with many other webmasters. If one of those webmasters caused the IP get blacklisted, you get affected too.

And because of these reasons, some web hostings even have rules against running mailing list and autoresponder scripts.

When you’ve done these two — checking for spam triggers in your content, and using a third party remoted hosted solution, your emails will most likely get delivered.

On with the next issue — getting your emails opened.

Let me say this — in the long-run, you need to build relationship with your readers. But for something that you can do right now, you need to write better subject lines.

I am not really an expert in copywriting. Heck, I suck at it. Even if I get results from my writings, I can’t actually say which is it that gets the clicks. Anyhow, I can point you to the resources that I have been using.

Here are a few links you may want to check out.

Subject Line Experiment
http://mailchimp.blogs.com/blog/2006/04/subject_line_ex.html
This is interesting. It shows that straight to the point subject lines work better than sales pitching subjects. Check it out. This is one is great.

Email Marketing Subject Line Comparison
http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/subject-line-comparison.phtml
This is a chart of many subject lines compared side by side.

Subject Line that Works
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=842151

Subject Line Secrets
http://www.infoprofitshare.com/go.php?offer=kidino&pid=2

Alright, when you have done all the above, now we can think about getting the clicks. To get the clicks, the URLs have to be clickable. If you are sending your emails in HTML, make sure you make them into a live clickable URL.

Sometimes, when I have an important message, I put the link early in the email. I say, “If you are in a rush, click here [LINK]“. Sometimes people just wanna see your link and get there fast. So why not just give it to them.

And normally starting your email with a story also helps. Start with a line that your readers understand that it’s story. Here’s one example …

“I am exhausted and I have a big headache…”

“I thought that it would work, but it didn’t…”

“I looked at the work and I thought, ‘My mother could do better’”

Well, I think you get the idea. If you read the examples above, you are actually baiting the readers to read the rest of the story. And later lead them to your link. That will get them to click on it. Or, you can also finish the story on your website. There’s a reason to get you readers to click on the link.

Alright, I guess that’s all that I can say for now. Maybe you need to read this again to really understand this. But most importantly, you need to put try this yourself. Then you’ll know how powerful (or not) this is.