Manage Email Signatures centrally from your Desktop - For All Users

Jesper Frier

Can the wording used in your newsletter’s hyperlinks make a difference in clickthrough rates? The answer is yes.

Turns out that the right two or three click link words can lift your clickthroughs by more than 8%.

Results From Hyperlink Test

"Click to continue": 8.53%
"Continue to article": 3.3%
"Read more": (-)1.8%

4 Lessons Learned
During our industry research and testing, we discovered a few things that we didn't know about email hyperlinks that we wanted to pass along. Here are our four big lessons learned:

It's important to realize that the words used by your peers can be relevant to increasing your clickthrough rates. Doing a sector-wide comparison like we did might not sound like rocket science, but we're guessing there's a good chance your creative team has yet to do this.
If you publish a content-based newsletter, avoid using "Read [insert any adverb]." We strongly believe that online readers skim far, far more often than they read. So, it makes no sense to sell your idea as an activity they've come to instinctively avoid. The results prove our instinct was dead on.
If you redirect newsletter traffic so you can track clickthroughs, make sure you don't simply mirror the actual URL. Change the link into something that looks totally different. Not doing so can raise flags with filters and end up marking you as a possible spammer.
Finally, you guessed it: Test! More importantly, think outside the box in terms of what *needs* to be tested. We're certainly glad we did.

Click to continue