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6 Simple Ways to Get More Email Clicks

Last updated: October 3, 2023

Clicks are the most important currency for any email marketer, whether you’re running ads in your weekly newsletters, trying to convert newsletter readers into paid subscribers, or trying to increase revenue for your publication. (And since the rollout of Apple’s MPP, click rate is also the most reliable indicator of email marketing success.)  

But if you’ve been in the media game for a while, you know that clicks are getting harder to come by. ISPs are judging sender reputation more strictly than ever, making it more difficult to even reach primary inboxes. And those that do face more competition than ever.  

So how can you get the engagement you need to grow your business? Try these tips from our team:  

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6 Simple Ways to Get More Email Clicks

1. Evaluate your current email strategy   

Before making any big changes, evaluate your current email strategy. How has your average email click rate been trending over the last few quarters? How does it stack up against industry standards?   

For context, the average click rate for Omeda clients, most of whom are publishers, ranges from 1.42 to 1.67% in any given quarter. But we see wide variation between different email types: For instance, newsletters typically have a click rate around 2% whereas promotions hover around 1%.  

(Not in media? Use our benchmark calculator to see how your metrics measure up with your industry peers.) 

If your click rate is consistently below average, you’ll need to improve your segmentation, content, design or a combination of the three to get more engagement and conversions (keep reading for more tips on that front).   

If your click rates meet or exceed benchmarks, your email strategy probably already has a strong foundation. But there’s always room to improve — and if you stop at saying that your emails get 1.55% clicks, for example, you’re missing opportunities to learn more about your audience preferences and replicate your successes.

So look into your email reports to identify key success levers and growth opportunities. On Omeda, this includes:  

• Opens by Device: See how your emails perform across different devices and formats. Pay close attention to these reports just after new iPhone and Android rollouts to ensure your designs are keeping up with your recipients’ devices.
   
• Tracking Links Clicked: This tells you how many people clicked each link within an email. If you’re sending a newsletter with multiple articles, use this to evaluate which articles drive the most website traffic.
   
• Summary By Link Category: In Email Builder, you can assign links and categories to each link that you use in an email. For instance, you can group all of your advertiser links under the Advertising category and all of your whitepaper links under the Whitepaper category. From there, use the Summary by Link Category report to see how many clicks you earn from each link in a particular category.  This is especially useful if you’re running the same advertiser link in multiple campaigns and you need an easy way to evaluate how many conversions it drove – or if you want to see whether emails that promote gated content drive more conversions than your newsletters.
   
• URL Click Report: So you have multiple ways to count the number of clicks you get. But that doesn’t tell you anything about who clicked, or why. The URL Click Report gives you data about the recipients that clicked on each link within an email. Use this to inform your email segmentation and content strategy going forward.
   
• Clickbot Summary Report: All of these reports give you crucial information about who is interested in your product and why. But if they include fake click from bots, you’ll have a hard time drawing any meaningful information from them. While many ESPs — including Omeda — automatically remove fake clicks from email reports, it’s still worth knowing how much of your email traffic is real. Use the Clickbot Summary Report to see how many clicks that were counted and also those that were negated due to the automated click activity that occurs at the receiving servers. You can also see why each “fake” click was negated, as well as when it occurred.  

2. Use dynamic content to tailor offerings to each viewer

Segmentation is a great way to personalize your messaging to broad segments of your audience. But even within demographic or behavioral segments, there’s a lot of individual variation.  

Say that Logan and Ewan are two senior-level media executives in B2B publishing located in New York City. Based on those characteristics, they’d probably end up in the same marketing segment.  

But when you check your CDP’s website analytics, you see that Logan’s been reading content about finance while Ewan’s been reading about environmental issues. So it’s hard to create a newsletter with articles both will like without being too generic.  

Sure, you could create another behavioral segment accounting for those differences — but you can’t replicate this for every in your 1,000+ person audience.  

So how can you ensure your content is as relevant as possible for everyone on your list — without taking on an unsustainable workload? Use dynamic content in your emails. This allows you to provide tailored content to individual recipients, based on their demographics, past reading and purchase history, or subscription class, without needing to create new emails.  

On Omeda, you can use dynamic content to:  

• send targeted offers to customers with varying subscription classes 
• recommend different articles to recipients based on their interests or web behavior 
• personalize content based on the recipient’s location  

3. Incorporate interactive elements strategically  

Add more images. Put a video in the header. GIFs everywhere. For the last decade, marketers have leaned on multimedia, graphics and responsive design to earn attention (and incremental clicks).

But overloading your emails with multimedia gives it the feel of an early 2000s pop-up heavy website: People will open it, get overwhelmed by all the visuals and messaging, and forget why they opened in the first place. And they’ll click out, rather than clicking on any of your CTAs.

All of your design elements should support your ultimate goal: guiding the reader’s eye (and cursor!) toward your CTA. To do this, follow these best practices: 

• Don’t place relevant information within images. If images don’t load or render incorrectly, as is often the case on mobile devices, this renders your email unreadable. Instead, use graphics for primarily illustrative purposes, then include any vital information and CTA messaging in plain text.

• Make your emails scannable. If your email is long (requiring two or three scans to read the full thing), consider breaking it up like a blog post, using subheads or images for better readability.

4. Include subscriber-only content in your emails  

If your emails are indistinguishable from your other marketing channels, your audience isn’t incentivized to stay subscribed to your email list, let alone click anything inside. 

To give your emails an edge, consider making special articles, blog posts, podcasts, access to product updates/new publications, or other educational resources available only to subscribers. (We see this a lot in the podcasting world, with exclusive interviews available only to Patreon subscribers.)  

Besides increasing website traffic, this also gives your email marketing an important sense of exclusivity: Subscribe to our list and you’ll get content you really won’t see anywhere else.  

If your content’s good enough, that’ll fuel the word of mouth traffic that everyone’s chasing — and so few can attain — these days.  

5. Collect feedback   

When you’re looking for clicks, you’re really looking for your audience to interact and engage with you. So think of ways to start the conversation with your audience, rather than only blasting links to blog posts at them and hoping they click through.  

One of the best ways to do that? Include polls or surveys in your emails. There’s the obvious benefit —  that someone can’t complete the survey without clicking through to your site.  

Soliciting feedback from your audience also helps you enhance your customer profiles, create more exact marketing segments and even come up with more relevant content ideas. All of which helps you serve your audience (and you guessed it, get more clicks) in the future.  

6. Optimize your CTA messages for clicks   

Once you’ve gotten someone to open and read your email to completion, they’ll probably click through. But if your CTA message doesn’t match your offer, isn’t in an intuitive location, or isn’t designed properly, you’re missing easy chances to engage your most interested audience members.  

But there’s a lot that goes into a CTA, and it can be difficult to isolate exactly what factors convince your audience to click.   

A/B testing your CTA messages will help you identify the best variables for your CTAs — and do it quickly enough to be relevant. For best results, we recommend running tests for your call-to-action message copy, as well as the placement of  the button within the email, and the design of the button. (And while you’re at it, experiment with subject lines, best send days and best send times well.)  

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