The No. 1 objective of an email marketing message is to get a click. That is the takeaway from the latest free clinic by MarketingExperiments' Dr. Flint McGlaughlin.
In "Crafting an Engaging Email Message" (available on demand), we get a quick primer on how to improve clickthrough, as demonstrated by a simple yet powerful test case. Two identically designed emails offer a free white paper download:
Version A presents a headline, short introduction, four points of value, and a "download" button.
Version B presents the white paper title, first three paragraphs, and a "read more" button.
If you're like me--and nearly 70% of the webinar participants--you'd vote for Version A, because it sells the benefits of reading the paper.
But you'd be wrong. In the test case, Version B got 85% more downloads than Version A. Why? Because Version B makes it easy to jump from reading three paragraphs to reading more with one click.
Version A made it hard to decide whether downloading the paper is worthwhile.
So here are the rules we learned from this session:
- Give recipients just enough value to inspire them to click for more.
- Let the landing page do the job of converting that click to action.
- Emails should not say exactly what is on the landing page.
- Emails should take less than 30 seconds to read.
- Emails should not look and feel like a web page, advertisement or catalog page.
- Emails should have just one call to action.
Comments