Part 3: Email marketing – one of the most cost effective marketing channels available.

(Read my post on “The Social Media – Email Connection and Four Strategies to Connect Them” to see how email marketing can be even MORE effective!)

A study was recently released showing the latest email marketing trends. There are a few great nuggets of information I will share over the next few blog posts.

Today: Click Rates by Number of Links

Which emails do you think have higher click through rates? Ones that have  a lot of links, or ones with fewer links?

In 2009, click rates were highest on email messages with more than 20 links. Most of these messages were likely email newsletters, with multiple articles and other items of interest to the recipients.

It’s a best practice in email newsletters to make the headline a link to the full article text, as well as including a “read more” link at the end of the article summary.

The second highest click rates went to email messages with between 1 and 5 links. These tend to be brief promotional emails with a few calls to action. With promotional email messages, don’t make your subscribers scroll through the entire email to get to the link you want them to click on. It’s a best practice to include the key call to action in multiple places in the email.

Be sure you have a call to action with a link at the beginning, middle and end of your email message so that subscribers don’t have to search for a link when they are ready to take action.

• Tip: Just because you can link to something doesn’t mean that you should. Make sure that every link in your email message drives people toward the action you want them to take. Don’t take them on tangents where they’ll have trouble getting to your desired action.

From: MailerMailer July 2010 Email Marketing Metric report.