A click means someone has engaged with your email, looked at something inside it, and decided to explore further. It seems obvious that this is a good thing – after all, isn’t that what your email is trying to achieve? But is there more to it? What do clicks really mean, and how can they affect your email marketing both immediately and in the future?
CTAs - The Main Purpose of Many Emails
The vast majority of marketing emails want one main click – the one that takes your reader from the email and onto your website or whatever other platform where they can purchase whatever it is you’re offering. It’s the call to action or CTA, and it’s the most substantial click of them all.
If you get a CTA click, that means your email was successful – it’s as simple as that. And it shows that you were doing something right. A CTA click means:
- Your email was opened
- Your email was read
- Your offer was enticing
- The reader went from being a cool prospect to a warm or hot lead
Perfect.
Soft CTAs - Buried Clicks
For the most part, a softer CTA click is just as good as a main CTA click, but they can be a little more subtle when exploring the data. A soft CTA click may be because you embedded a link in a main image or offered a subtle option, like a ‘learn more’ button.
While these softer CTAs might not convert as effectively as main CTAs, they’re still showing the same thing: engagement with your content. That’s great.
Other Clicks
Most of your clicks will be CTAs, whether soft or hard, but there are also a few administrative-type clicks you might get, such as ‘change my settings’ or (horror!) ‘unsubscribe’. These can add complication to the core idea of ‘how many clicks did my email get?’, but when properly tracked, can provide essential data in themselves. Non-CTA clicks shouldn’t be dismissed.
How Clicks Help Drive Deliverability
Email service providers and mailbox systems thrive on data, and clicks are good data. In the background of the internet, there’s a lot of analysis going on, and your email click rates are forming part of that. From a service provider point of view, more clicks are very interesting.
When your email generates a click, the system sees engagement. Something about your email is passing the inbox stage and moving on to real human interaction. The ‘you’re doing something right’ effect is tangible:
- Your email domain increases in authority
- Your trust levels increase
- You are less likely to be considered spam
- You are more reliable
This means you’ll get past many more spam checkers and security concerns in the future. Clicks today directly convert to improved deliverability tomorrow.
How Clicks Help Develop Content
All that data is also yours to explore. Your click statistics can be fed back into your own data analysis, offering information such as:
- Which subjects get more engagement
- What media is liked more
- What pictures generate clicks
- What button layouts improve CTAs
- Which colours encourage follow up
With some solid data cross-referencing, clicks can show you all sorts of things. Learn whether your demographic prefers to follow up by watching a video or reading an article; evaluate your paragraph and sentence lengths to understand if your readers like denser text or snappier commentary; see whether bright colours or emojis encourage more engagement.
Email marketing data analysis can shape future content creation, from the topics you focus on, to the way you present yourself.
How Clicks Help You Understand Your Audience
It’s not just about your emails, but the people you are interacting with. Do you get:
- More clicks from female or male subscribers?
- Better engagement earlier in the day or later?
- Younger readers or older ones?
This will help you segment your email lists, focusing on what works so that the right products and services are targeted to the right demographic. Tailored email marketing in the future will be more effective, resulting in a higher percentage of CTA clicks and conversions, and feeding the system with yet more viable data.
How Even Bad (or Zero) Clicks Help Get It Right
Email data can typically separate unsubscribe clicks from CTA interactions, so mistakes from mixing data are avoided – and knowing which type of link was clicked means you can learn from the more negative side of things as well as the positive. Unsubscribe clicks aren’t useless data; they can provide key insights for developing a marketing strategy.
- Do you get more unsubscribes when your email frequency goes up?
- Are people reaching for the preferences whenever your emails are a bit more lengthy?
- Do you simply get opens but no clicks when you forget to include images?
There’s no such thing as ‘no data’ as every interaction tells a story worth listening to. Learn to understand the patterns of information, and it’s possible to direct future campaigns with a sharper eye.
Exploring Clicks with Nathan Littleton
Working through all that data might sound like a headache, but that’s fine because I’m here to help. Together, we can analyse your click statistics and build a comprehensive picture of your marketing hits and misses – from there, improvement is more than possible. To talk to me about boosting your email results, book a consultation today.
