Monday, June 3, 2013

Using Click-Through Rate for E-mail Campaigns

You hear bloggers and businesses talking about it all the time. Much has been said about its effect to one’s website marketing strategies. What is click-through rate and all this buzz surrounding it anyway?
CTR or click-through rate explained

This is a fairly common tool used in e-mail campaign, and its efficacy goes beyond brand advertising. In a nutshell, it is an indicator of your ad relevance to your target market. It determines how interesting your brand’s message is to the audience, and if it resonates with their demands and desires.

For e-mail campaigns, it is a reliable indicator of success simply because it measures how many impressions or clicks are made on e-mail newsletter hyperlinks. When a recipient clicks on such, it clearly indicates that he has taken interest on what you offer. Each click – regardless how many times – counts as one click-through rate each time. 

                                        Image From: http://blog.viralheat.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/CTR1.jpg


Why they matter for your site and e-mail campaigns

Campaign newsletters encourage your target market to pay your website a visit. Through e-mails, you can place as many links as you want to pages that you wish to promote, particularly products and services that need an extra boost. Also, making use of CTR tools allows you to access relevant information including how many clicks have been made per link so you can better gauge the effect your campaigns have on the audience.

They let you identify the number of people who have actually read your newsletter content as evidence by the impressions. Oftentimes, CTR is a more valuable and reliable indicator than open rate measurement for marketers.

Factors affecting click-through

In general, its effectiveness though depends largely on several factors including the channel or mode, keywords and others.

For e-mail campaigns, these factors can be a little more complicated, such as the subject title, your target recipients, e-mail type and audience segmentation.

With so many things to consider for your campaigns, it would be wise to integrate social media as well to enhance CTR. As such, you might want to consider a suite or program that allows you to embed social sharing buttons in your newsletters so your audience can easily share your campaigns on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

As in any other aspect of your brand marketing, you must set and manage goals when it comes to CTR in your e-mail newsletters. Integrate features that enhance user interaction with your brand. Be it polls, social media buttons or hyperlinks, any feature that can potentially improve user engagement must be considered for future use.