Here’s how to understand click rates (and improve them):
In their most basic definition, click rates measure recipient engagement (i.e. whether or not an end user clicks on a link, either embedded in an email or on a website). To calculate the click rate of an email, divide the number of unique clicks in the email by the number of total recipients. This number is then expressed as a percentage.
Improving your click rates, however, requires a little more effort. The July 2012 Edition of Mailer Mailer has discovered that “emails with a greater number of links provide more opportunities for, and a greater variety of engagement. Emails with fewer links enable less, and more focused, interaction.” With this in mind, it’s nevertheless important to restrain yourself from overloading links into your email marketing campaign. Don’t go too crazy with links! The key to improving click rates, then, comes with testing your success ratio—testing the ratio of links that works best for your email campaigns. I personally expect the magic number to exist somewhere around 5. Note: images should include links as well.
For more information on click rates, head over to the July 2012 Edition of the Email Marketing Metrics Report.
-Christopher Lin, Lexity
