Are you tired of pouring your heart into your newsletter only to see lackluster click-through rates? You’re not alone.
Even the true newsletter veterans find themselves grappling with this crucial metric.
Did you know that while the average click-through rate across industries hovers around 2.5%, improving even a fraction can lead to significant gains? With recent iOS privacy changes making open rates less reliable, focusing on click-through rates has never been more essential.
In this guide, we’ll explore proven strategies to elevate your newsletter’s performance, from crafting compelling subject lines to optimizing your content for maximum engagement. Let’s transform your newsletters from overlooked to irresistible, ensuring every click counts!
Tips to increase newsletter click-through rate
While your newsletter CTR might already be solid in your eyes, better is always better. For instance, did you know that by including interesting videos studies in your newsletter, you can improve your CTR by 200-300%?
Make sure you read all the way through this, or you may miss our favorite tip on increasing CTR at the end.
Get people to open up your email
Sounds simple, right? To get any CTR at all on your email newsletter, people literally have to click on the email and open it up. So the logical first step is to get more people opening up your email instead of scrolling past it.
Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection was implemented to protect the privacy of their users, and this has basically to give people the opportunity to hide if and when they open up marketing emails. With that change, open rates have become less reliable a metric, so in a way, tracking click-through rate is the best way to show if people are actually opening your email.
Cleaning and segmenting your email contact list is a great idea, too. The idea should always be to have as many active subscribers as you possibly can, and your CTR should go up when you clean your list because you’re removing any inactive subscribers that can knock down those numbers.
With organized segments for your subscribers, you will be making content that is personalized to those people, which should also drive CTR numbers positively given that you are gearing the content to what it is that they’re looking for.
Having a healthy email list is all well and good, but it’s your subject line and preview text that will actually drive your subscribers to opening your email.
Make your subject line and preview text interesting
Subject lines and preview text are the first things that readers and subscribers see in their inbox pertaining to your newsletter, so you have to hook them inside of the five seconds it takes them to read and scroll the preview of your email.
There are plenty of things you can do to make these interesting, but the three main tenets that you should stick to are:
- Create curiosity
- Ask a question
- Make a statement
Good subject lines are examples like: “2 Sneaky Week 5 Scoring Options” or “2024’s Breakout Team Has Arrived”. Both of these entice readers to open up the email to see exactly what the subject lines are talking about because they introduce something that isn’t explicitly mentioned but could potentially make a massive impact.
For preview text, it can vary as to what works. If we’re continuing our fantasy football examples (as I’m wont to do), introducing another angle to your subject line can be enticing. On the subject of “2024’s Breakout Team Has Arrived”, you could have preview text such as “Their QB is on fire!”, which illustrates another piece of the subject line and tells some more of the story, making readers want to open up the email and get the rest of the puzzle.
Remember, the goal isn’t to create clickbait. The goal is to get people to open your emails so that you can provide value to them.
Always confirm the curiosity you create with your subject line and preview text with the actual content of your email. Always deliver on the promises of your subject line.
Be personal and personalize your emails
Similar to what we talked about in our email marketing tips and strategies piece, being personable in your newsletter and making the reader feel like they’re having a conversation with you yourself is paramount. Remember, the reason people subscribe to your newsletter is mainly due to the connection they forge with you and your writing, not a faceless email. From a business perspective, it’s not about your company, it’s about what your company represents to your readers.
Sending your newsletter email from a personal address with your name on it, not a company’s, as well as sending surveys to subscribers to figure out what you could be doing better are two of the many ways that you can be personal with your subscribers. It ensures that anyone subscribing to your newsletter knows that you are creating content for THEM, not just for yourself.
Create good content and write good copy
This feels self-explanatory, right?
If you aren’t providing value to your subscribers by creating content around a subject that they’re interested in, why are they subscribed to your newsletter?
Or more importantly, why would they stay subscribed?
Take it a bit further, though. We want subscribers to our newsletter to enjoy opening the newsletter and reading completely through it. It should be easy to understand the point of that edition of the newsletter and you should explain that point early enough so that the reader doesn’t get bored reading the email.
As we mentioned above, you should also make sure that you are writing copy that delivers on your subject line and preview text. By really driving a reader to open with a good subject line and preview text, you are showing that you have an engaging idea that makes a subscriber want to see more.
Grammar, punctuation, formatting and clarity are things that seem small in nature but can easily drive a subscriber to not want to read your newsletter. You need to proofread, period. Nobody wants to read something that they can’t understand. Another editing or proofreading perspective to consider comes from our founder Jordan.
“Remember, you can’t unsend an edition of a newsletter. It’s not a blog post that you can go back and edit. Once you hit send, it is completely out of your control. Create a pre send process and checklist, and stick to it.”
Calls to Action
Calls to action, or CTAs, are buttons, links or text in your email that encourage readers to take a specific action. They can be as simple as telling you to read something, or they can be more specific, like telling you to sign up for a sale.
The goal of a CTA, outside of driving an action, is to create urgency in the reader. They need to feel as though if they don’t click the button or take the action, they’ll miss out on the experience. Given that, you need to make your CTAs easy and interesting, not like it’s a job or chore.
For example:
Good: Subscribe today and receive 40% off your next month’s purchase!
Bad: Connect with us today and receive a discount once you sign up!
The difference between the two is that the top example clearly outlines the action that needs to be taken while flat-out stating what the incentive is. The bottom one has a vague action to be taken (connect) and does not totally tell you what you’ll get for connecting with them.
Another thing to keep in mind while designing your CTAs is the use of buttons. Buttons are more of a draw than links for CTAs, simply due to them appearing more clearly to subscribers and readers, and do help improve CTR, but keep in mind that you want the reader to focus on a single idea, not multiple. Knowing this, don’t go overboard on buttons.
Aggregation
By far, our number one tip to increase CTR is aggregation (see how we had you go all the way through the article to get our best tip?).
One section of your newsletter should be a space to put news, notes, cool things and content that comes up in your industry. It can be your own content, or it can be content that you aggregate from different mediums in your industry, which could also open up the door to future collaborations.
One of my favorite newsletters is the Fantasy Life newsletter from Matthew Berry’s Fantasy Life. It includes an “Around the Watercooler” section that included funny tweets, instant reactions to trades, funny jokes, and interesting clips from various social media locations. Our founder developed this concept when he was the Chief Content Officer there and it was a gamechanger for engagement and CTR.
Aggregation can be terrific for your website and/or social accounts. By aggregating content from posts on social feeds onto your newsletter, you can engage with your subscribers without needing to create new content. Not only this, but aggregation can also lead to partnerships with other creators or organizations if both sites benefit from the arrangement.
This benefits you, obviously, but it also benefits the organization/person you aggregated the content from by giving them another location of distribution.
Lastly, don’t forget the importance of CTAs in this as well! You want to drive someone to click on the content that you’re aggregating. Make sure you include an engaging hook that helps your CTA deliver.
An example of an aggregated piece of content with a great CTA and hook is “Jerry Jones got heated in radio interview. Stay for the end lol.” By bolding the CTA, you have hooked your reader and now they’ll click on the CTA to go watch that whole interview.
Interactive elements
Getting your subscribers to interact with your newsletter is a key way to increase your CTR, as well.
Add in quizzes, polls, trivia questions, and things of that nature in order to get people to keep scrolling and clicking on your newsletter. Value adds like these make the reader feel like they’re a key part of the process with you and also serve to give you data on what people are interested in.
An understated importance of interactive elements is that they serve to give some color (literally) to your newsletter. There’s nothing more boring than a lot of words on a page, and changing things up with those options makes your newsletter look a lot more interesting.
Email feedback and ratings are interactive pieces that you can add as well. By including a P.S. section at the end of your newsletter asking how you did or giving the reader a button to email you with thoughts (another CTA, by the way), you are giving readers another reason to engage with you.
Email design and optimization
As I mentioned above, keeping things simple is key with your newsletter. You certainly don’t want to be boring, but you also have a clear goal: get the reader to keep clicking while they read your entire newsletter.
You don’t want to overcomplicate the design of your email. People want things delivered succinctly and quickly so that they can understand and dive into what they’re reading.
You also need to make sure that your CTAs stand out. You want to convert them into your goal, be that website traffic, a sale, a product, etc. Giving them more options to look at to get distracted, or worse, to click off the page entirely, is never a good thing!
Make sure your links are a different color from your text! Bright colors work best in this case, as you want them to stand out to readers so they can click on them.
Perhaps most importantly here, optimize your newsletter for mobile devices. Most email account checking these days is done from a mobile device, so if a subscriber clicks on your newsletter only to realize that images don’t load, the speed is slow, and things look out of place, that subscriber will not be returning to your newsletter most likely.
A/B testing
A/B testing is a tool that everyone should use for their newsletter. It involves sending out two different types of newsletters to subscribers to check which one does better. These results can often help increase CTR by helping you understand what your customers want better.
You can do A/B testing in several different ways:
- Different subject lines
- Images
- CTAs
- Body text
- Delivery day and time
When you perform A/B testing, the main goal is to test what works best for your readers and subscribers. What do they react best to? Is there a style of writing and copy that they prefer?
Timing
Timing is absolutely key. Remember, in our email marketing tips (insert link) article, we discovered that most email marketing success comes from 9 AM-12 PM, when people are getting into work and opening up their emails.
There’s not an exact science to this, though. People will open their emails whenever it’s convenient for them, so A/B testing in order to figure out which time works BEST for your readers is important.
