Email marketing is more than just a communication tool to inform prospects and build relationships with customers. With the number of global email users set to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025 (1), email remains one of the most effective digital channels to drive traffic to your website.

Whether you’re new to email marketing or refining your existing strategies, here are nine techniques to maximize email engagement and attract more visitors to your website:

1. Use Welcome Emails to Showcase Your Website

Among all types of business emails, welcome emails continue to receive the highest open rates. A recent study revealed that the average open rate for a welcome email was around 86 percent (2), so it’s crucial to seize this opportunity to engage prospects. Use welcome emails to introduce people to your business, highlight the benefits of your products and services, and convince people to visit your website.

While promotional emails should typically include one primary call to action (CTA), welcome emails can include multiple links to direct users to various website pages. For example, include links to your About page, FAQ page, blog, email preference center, testimonials page, or the product page. The idea is to cater to the unique needs of each subscriber.

2. Be More Concise

While welcome emails typically include more information, they should still be concise. This is especially important for other types of emails such as discount emails, surveys, announcements, and abandoned cart emails. In most cases, brevity is key.

According to one study, 50 to 125 words of email copy is the ideal length, receiving the highest response rates of around 50 percent (3). Another study analyzing over two million emails showed that emails with approximately 20 lines of text received the highest number of click-throughs from email subscribers (4).

In other words, if you want more people to click through to your website, get straight to the point.

3. Organize Contacts Based on Interest

By segmenting your list into smaller groups according to specific criteria, you can provide more relevant content that is more likely to hit home with subscribers. At the very least, you should divide your list based on demographics, location, purchase behavior, or interests. This means you can create more personalized, relevant content that is more likely to drive high-quality traffic to your website.

Even if you haven’t collected enough subscriber information via your email signup form, you can send out email surveys to learn more about your subscribers, or direct users to an email preference center page.

4. Link to Exclusive Content

Regular newsletters are a great way to build brand awareness and drive more visitors to your website. By providing valuable content that doesn’t directly focus on selling products or services, you can build trust and position yourself as a valuable resource to prospects.

If you have a company blog, remember to promote new content via email. Include a short synopsis or extract from your new article and insert a “Read more” CTA to drive traffic.

5. Promote Your Social Media Channels

When subscribers connect with you on social media, you’ll ultimately reach a wider audience, build more links to your content, and create more opportunities for people to visit your website. Include social media buttons or “share” tags in your emails so that subscribers can cross-promote your content. You can also link to your social media profiles in your email signature.

Additionally, use your social media channels to invite followers to subscribe to your email list, and remember to promote your latest email content.

6. Ask for Reviews

Email marketing is a great way to solicit reviews from genuine customers. With more reviews on third-party sites, you have more opportunities to reach potential customers and drive website traffic. Apart from driving extra traffic, relevant keywords that appear in reviews help to improve your search engine rankings. If you run a local business, reviews are especially helpful in boosting your rankings in local search results.

One of the best times to request reviews is post-purchase when your business is still fresh in the customer’s mind. When asking for reviews, keep it short and sweet. Simply thank customers for their loyalty, ask them for a review, and include a link to a review site.

7. Send Mobile-Friendly Emails

It’s no secret that an increasing number of consumers are opening emails on mobile devices. According to Statista, around 49 percent of marketing emails in the United States are read on a mobile device (5). This is why every business using email marketing should use a responsive design to ensure emails are easy to view and scan on any device.

However, it’s also important to simplify email messages for mobile users. For example:

• Write shorter subject lines that don’t get cut off.
• When writing the body of your email, aim for no more than 125 words.
• Use bold text and bullet points to highlight important information.
• Use large CTA buttons that are easier to click.

Following these best practices will not only reduce your unsubscribe rates, it will also encourage more click-throughs to your site.

8. Use One Primary CTA

To drive more traffic to specific pages on your site, it’s best to stick to one major CTA for each email message. If you include multiple CTAs that point to different areas of your website, it can lead to confusion and kill conversions. In one study, emails with a single CTA received 371 percent more clicks compared to those with multiple CTAs (6).

CTA buttons and text links can both work well, but it’s always a good idea to test different CTAs and measure the results for each email campaign.

9. Track Your Email and Website Analytics

There are various free tools to help you analyze your email and website performance. For example, Google Analytics is one of the best tools available to monitor website traffic and analyze visitor behavior. Most email marketing platforms also have built-in analytics tools so you can track the performance of campaigns.

Take advantage of these tools to see how much traffic is coming to your website and where it’s coming from. By measuring email click-through rates and website visits after each email campaign, you’ll discover which emails are resonating with your audience. You can then fine-tune your strategies to maximize email engagement and website traffic.

Wrapping Up

The most successful email marketing campaigns not only increase brand awareness and strengthen brand credibility but also have a significant impact on website traffic. If you want email marketing to play a significant role in the success of your business, use a combination of the strategies outlined here to encourage more readers to visit your website. This will not only strengthen your search engine rankings and generate more leads, but it will also help you convert more visitors into repeat customers.

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Sources:

1. statista.com/statistics/255080/number-of-e-mail-users-worldwide/

2. getresponse.com/resources/reports/email-marketing-benchmarks

3. theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/the-perfect-email/462624/

4. constantcontact.com/blog/email-images/

5. statista.com/statistics/433662/email-open-share-usa-by-device/

6. wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/06/10/digital-marketing-stats