Finding Your Best Call to Action

Finding Your Best Call to ActionAn email should never be a final destination. It should merely be a pit-stop on the email marketing highway where readers can hop on and off of the freeway at their convenience, but still have a way to arrive at the ultimate ending point (your website) at any time.

The best way to get subscribers from Point A to Point B is to use calls to action that guide and encourage click-throughs. Over 30 percent of email marketers recently surveyed by AWeber agree: words like “click here,” “read more,” and “buy now” make it clear that you want subscribers to do something else after reading your message and increase conversion rates significantly.

The problem is that most email marketing messages include multiple calls to action that lead to the same page. How can you know which one is most effective when click tracking only reports the number of clicks per domain?

Track Clicks to the Same Page in a New Way

To find out which of the duplicate links perform best in your messages, you simply have to use “tags” to make the links slightly different without affecting their functionality.

Once the different links are clicked, you can easily view the totals for the different links in your message statistics, which can help when you’re creating future messages and wondering where you should place really important links.

A Practical Example: Tea Collection

Take for example this email from Tea Collection, a clothing site for kids.

Tea Collection email example

There are multiple navigation links in the header, body and footer of this message that lead back to the same product pages on Tea Collection’s website.

If we were tracking which particular links performed best in this email, we would tag each of the links with a certain identifying code or phrase when adding them to the message.

In this case, adding “#message_header,” “#message_body” and “#message_footer” to the end of each corresponding link would indicate where in the message the link was clicked.

Tea Collection email header

Tea Collection email body

Tea Collection email footer

Applying Tracking to Your Own Messages

With your own emails, you can use any tracking codes that you want at the end of your links (as long as they start with #) but they can’t match any other anchors that already exist on the page.

Consider This URL: http://aweber.com/blog/#footer

Notice that if you click that link, you automatically jump to the bottom of the page, which isn’t ideal. If we were sending an email with a link back to our blog, we couldn’t use “footer” as a tracking code.

On the other hand, “email_footer” would work there, because “email_footer” is not an anchor anywhere on that page. You can see this by going to http://aweber.com/blog/#email_footer – it doesn’t jump you way down on the page.

Once you add tags to your URLs and send your message, you’ll find a separate statistic for each of the links that point to the same page on the stats summary for that email.

See For Yourself!

Adding tracking codes to the links in your emails will give you a clear indication of which link is most successful, and you’ll also be able to segment your list and send messages only to those people with one click of your mouse if you wish to separate them from the rest of your subscribers.

By testing the placement of call to action links over a period of time, you’ll not only be able to see which links cause a click-through frenzy with subscribers, but you’ll also be able to test things like language and wording of offers.

How will you use this tactic? What will you test? We’d love to know! Leave your thoughts below.

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12 Comments

  1. Bee

    I think that is key. Limiting your calls to action will increase your conversion and clickthru rate. If you want to take advantage of several calls to action, then you will need to make several pages and focus on a specific call to action on that page. You will then need to create separate pages that focuses on each call to action.

    9/28/2010 12:01 pm
  2. Chris D.

    Great blog entry.

    When I was first starting out I was so reluctant to use a strong call to action in my emails as I was afraid of offending people on my list and turning them off. I quickly learned though if you want to make money you have to use a pretty strong call to action to get results.

    Thanks again for the great post.

    9/28/2010 6:21 pm
  3. Carole Anne Tomlinson, RN

    Great web site. I enjoyed reading it.

    9/29/2010 12:52 am
  4. Rebecca Swayze

    Bee, I completely agree. Calls to action can be tricky. If you include too many, you risk subscribers ignoring them. But to address Chris’ comment, if you don’t include them you risk not making a profit. There’s a fine line you have to walk, but tracking the most successful links is a great way to figure out your campaign’s strongest call to action.

    9/30/2010 8:59 am
  5. Roger Haeske

    Thanks so much.

    I’ve been wanting to know how to do this for a very long time. I’ve used other methods in the past. But now I can track precisely where in the message the link is just by the wording.

    9/30/2010 2:36 pm
  6. corey lewis

    I’ve heard before that the PS is often the most clicked link in an email. now I’ll have to use this link tracking tactic and test to see if that’s true or not.

    9/30/2010 10:03 pm
  7. Leon

    I just wanted to clarify… if i have a link http://www.example.com for example….if i add the tag like this: http://www.example.com/#1link
    that would track it as a unique link? so then i could add another one like this: http://www.example.com/#2link?

    Just want to make sure i get how to use the tag correctly.
    Thanks

    9/30/2010 11:59 pm
  8. Rebecca Swayze

    Corey – Let us know how your testing goes!

    Leon – That’s correct, it will be tracked as a unique link if you add a tag like #1link or #2link.

    10/5/2010 10:06 am
  9. Joan Jenkins

    Good blog. I am new to internet marketing and have just set up an aweber account. Thank you for your information regarding track clicks as I was unaware of that function. I can see how valuable they can be and I’m anxious to start using them in my existing campaigns.
    Once again thank you for the information.

    10/10/2010 1:21 pm
  10. Roger Haeske

    This doesn’t seem to be useful if you’re using just the URL because it doesn’t hide the tracking code.

    I mean if I use http://Example.com#bottom the URL is going to show #bottom as well in the URL. At least that’s what’s happening when I try it in my broadcast email.

    Is there a way to stop this from happening?

    I always use URL’s in my emails and not anchor type links.

    10/11/2010 10:18 pm
  11. Roger Haeske

    Ok, never mind, I figured out how to do it.

    I’ve just never used that box above to fill in the link text since my links are just URL’s normally.

    10/11/2010 10:36 pm
  12. kaspi

    Just to note: #something is not an option if you wish to process it with PHP. As the #something is not a part of a HTTP request, PHP will not be able to process it. I’ll give it a shot and say that any other server side script will be unable to track anything from this code simply because it won’t get it in the request.

    You can use javascript onload, but that is not a reliable option.

    If I’m missing some ingenious way in which this can be done with #, please do tell me.

    If you wish to track reliably using your own PHP code, you would have to use a parameter (like this):
    http://www.example.com?clickthru=header

    If you wish to use Google Analytics*:
    http://www.example.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=header&utm_campaign=promo

    The principle is almost the same.

    *GA campaign tracking url builder: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578

    11/6/2010 2:18 pm

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