White Space Improves Click Throughs

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We all know that in email marketing there are two main criteria that determine the effectiveness of a campaign. These are:

  1. Open Rate
  2. Click-Through Rate

The open-rate is down to subject line and branding. How well you have generated trust with your readership will play a massive role in the open rate you receive as will the value that your readers feel they can get from your content.

Don’t be mistaken into thinking that what you believe to be excellent value in your content is what your readers are going to deem to be good value. We’ve seen this happen time and again where we believe we are emailing an excellent piece of high value content only to see it have a much lower open-rate than something which we thought was lesser value.

The key here is to see what your readers are opening and respond to it by generating more content like it.

Of course, the more people that you get opening your emails then the more people are going to be clicking on your link. But once again these numbers can be very different. What we’ve found is that there are, generally speaking, these two scenarios:

  • Your reader opens your email because the subject line is appealing and interesting but find there is nothing related to the subject line inside the email then your click through rate is going to be very low. In fact you may be getting as low as just 1% or 2% of your mailing list clicking through.
  • Your reader opens your email because the subject line is appealing and interesting and finds the email continues this theme but doesn’t finish the story and so they click on the link to read to the end. This can result in some very high click through rates, as high as 35% or 40%!

If you have a mailing list of 10,000 people then a 1% click through rate means 100 people are seeing the web page you’re sending them to. A click through rate of 40% means that 4,000 people are seeing the web page you’re sending them to.

That’s a difference of 3,900 visitors from the same mailing list. Or, at a 1% sales conversion, the difference between one sale and forty sales. So you see why it’s so important to get this right!

Now this article isn’t about email copy but rather about designing your links. We’ve been trialling out a new link design for a few weeks and seen excellent results from it and I’m going to share it with you here, right now.

As with most things that improve click-through rates it isn’t particularly attractive but what we’ve found to increase our click-through rate is…

Add five pixels of white space around the link text. This is empty space which visually makes your link stand out from the rest of the text in the email. Doing this actually draws the eye of the reader to the link naturally without them realising.

Next you want to increase the font size on your text link by one or two sizes. How many is dependent on your auto-responder. What you want is to have a slightly larger font without making it look ridiculous. This adds to the visibility of the link by naturally drawing the eye to the text that is surrounded by more white space than the rest of the content and is slightly larger.

What I suggest is that you try this out in your email campaigns for a the next week and see if it works for you as well as it works for us.

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