Maximum Marketing Email Clickthrough Rates Made Easy

While email marketing is an incredibly profitable way to drum up new business, there's no denying a lot of people seem to struggle with it. Why? Because they're focusing on the wrong things. Because the real secret to sending out profitable marketing emails is...

Maximising your marketing email click through rates

Why?

Because, obviously, you can't sell anything unless they do click through to your sales page.

But, of course they can't click through to the sales page until they've read the email, or at least got it open; and they won't have it open until they've opened it.

Again, this is all very obvious, yet it's a chain of events internet marketers seem to ignore -- and they instead treat their emails as homogeneous lumps that either get a response or don't. And this is a huge mistake.

Here's the sequence that MUST occur before you can sell anything with a marketing email:

It has to be delivered - The simplest, cheapest, easiest, most hassle-free and foolproof way of doing this is to pay for a proper autoresponder service. I know you can get software to handle your list for you and some of it is very good. But the risks of having your domain blacklisted by one of the big anti-spam outfits like Spamhaus is just too high. I've actually seen it happen to a client of mine some years ago, and for over a week they were unable to get an email out to anyone -- even to ME. I'd also recommend double-opt in, but that's kind of moot since most of the popular email autoresponder services don't allow single opt-in any more.

It has to be opened - The key to getting your emails opened is the subject line. And while I can point you in the right direction, I have to caution you to test this yourself, because nothing works the same way all the time with every list. For example, I have two lists where with one of them I get a higher open rate if I put [Jon McCulloch] at the start of the Subject line, and one where I don't. Similarly using the first name of the reader (i.e. personalisation) in the Subject line doesn't work as well as it once did in the main. What i can tell you is Subjects that phrase things in the positive (e.g. "How to...") and/or give a list of benefits or things to do (e.g. "3 Tips for a Perfect...", "21 Ways to...", "How I...") consistently get better open rates than other formulae (and whatever you do don't be obscure thinking you're being clever -- I mean, you might be being clever, but you're also going to be poor).

It has to be read - It's at this point where two things come into play: your skills as a copywriter, and your relationship with the people on your list. And the better you are with the latter, the less you have to worry about the former. And the key to the relationship? Regular and frequent emails that have real value to your readers. I email my list every single day with cutting-edge marketing and copywriting tips and almost never try and sell anything. For that reason my readership rate (and thus my click-through rate) is astonishingly high.

And finally - the link gets clicked - In my experience (contrary to the "gurus'" proclamations and I have actually tested this in the field) simple HTML email links work better than naked links. By this I mean simple HTML emails with bold, italic, underline and anchor text (e.g. "click here to read my new post" rather than " http://yourdomain.com/read-my-new-post ") get a better click through. Why? It's hard to say, but my guess is the anchor text is a more natural instruction than an ugly link. A second thing you need to do is have at least three links: one near the top, one near the bottom, and one in the P.S.

What happens after that is a matter for another article, but is also a balance between your skills as a copywriter and your relationship with the people clicking through to the page.

Again, a genuine example: a blog i am involved with gets approximately 1% conversions on the sales page to cold visitors, but then yields 11.34% conversions if we can get their email address (and the launch sales letter for the product was just 360 words long and converted at 16% -- all because of the relationship and NOT just my skill as a copywriter).

Bottom line: to get maximum clickthrough rates for your marketing emails is not a standalone process and there's no magic wand or panacea. It's just one part of a chain of events, each of which has to be right before you can hope to make any money.


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Lead generation and email marketing expert Jon McCulloch is the author of "BIG Marketing Muscle for Small Business". This book reveals the strategies he has used to get response rates 300% better than traditional methods.

Your book is here: http://www.jonmcculloch.com/big-marketing-muscle