A Click-To-Open (CTO) rate is the percentage of people who open a marketing email after they have received it. Reputable digital marketing companies only send emails to people who have opted-in to receive marketing pieces, but opting-in to getting marketing emails does not bind a recipient to open those messages. If you want to increase your CTO rate, then there are a few processes you can follow or recommend to your digital marketing agency.
Over and over again, marketing researchers are finding that simply resending a marketing email to the same recipient who did not open it the first time gets the email opened the second time. Some researchers found that more that 50 percent of resent emails that were not opened originally get opened the second time. Sometimes researchers changed the subject line and resent the same content which got results as well, but it has been proven that resending marketing emails works.
If your demographic is male smartphone users, then you might decide to send out a large group of emails to that general target audience. The problem is that smartphone users ages 18 to 30 have different priorities than smartphone users ages 31 to 50. You need to separate out your target audience and create content that appeals to each sub-set of recipients. After some testing, you will discover how to speak to each segment of your audience and increase your CTO rate.
These days, just about everyone has a spam filter on their email service. If the individual recipient does not have a filter, then their email service provider has one for them. If you want your messages to get opened more often, then you have to increase their chances of getting past the spam filters. You do that by avoiding spam-triggering words and phrases such as:
Your individual industry will have its own list of spam triggers that you will need to discover and then avoid if you want your messages to get through.
If you are trying to cram too much information into one email, then your subject line is going to be confusing. If you want to increase your CTO rates, then you need to have one message per marketing email that allows you to write a very compelling subject line.
If you try to increase your CTO rate by using misleading subject lines, then you might see some initial success that reinforces your decision. But as your audience loses trust in your company, your CTO rates will plummet and it will take a long time for them to recover. Misleading subject lines in marketing emails makes people associate your company with scammers. Once you attach that reputation to yourself, you have created an uphill climb to credibility that might be impossible to achieve.
Your marketing emails are only effective if your target audience opens and reads them. Professional digital marketing experts spend time experimenting with different email approaches to find the ones that work. While you are experimenting with your emails, it is important to avoid doing anything that could compromise the reputation of your company and damage any future email campaigns.
