Get Them to Click: Drive Website Traffic with Email

Email marketing is like the Swiss army knife of marketing channels. You can use it to accomplish a wide variety of goals, including driving traffic to your website. 

Each email is an opportunity to direct your target audience where you want them to go: pages on your site. And it’s a much more cost-effective way to boost your web traffic than paid forms of advertising like display ads. 

Learn the ins and outs of how to drive website traffic with email so you can get more people on your site. 

Why email is your website’s best friend

Driving traffic to your website with email is all about links.

All of your marketing emails can (and should) include at least one link to a page on your brand website. Interested customers open your page, read it, and click on a link to continue engaging with your business. From there, you’re one step closer to completing a conversion. 

Also, unlike other sources that direct traffic to your website, like digital ads or social media content, you can retain complete control over your marketing emails. Third-party advertising platforms and social media sites could disappear overnight, taking all your audience with them. That’s not true with email marketing. You own your email list and can contact those subscribers directly, no matter what. 

That direct relationship between your brand and your email subscribers is part of what makes email marketing so effective. For every dollar companies spend on email marketing, they see an average return on investment of around $36, largely by driving readers to their websites. 

Before you write: Essential setup steps

Before you sit down to start crafting your clickable emails, lay the groundwork for successful email marketing campaigns. Make sure you tick these boxes:

• Understand your audience’s needs: Your audience will only engage with your message if it speaks to their specific needs or goals. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what they might want to hear from you. 
• Set clear goals for each email: Don’t just send generic messages and hope for the best. Instead, set specific goals for each email you send. Let those goals guide your decisions about the message, from the subject line to the call-to-action (CTA). 
• Choose the right landing pages: Each email should direct readers to a carefully selected landing page that perfectly ties in with the content of the message. For example, linking an email about a special sale to a landing page with products on sale is much more effective than just directing readers to your homepage. 
• Optimize for mobile devices: Over 90% of Americans own a smartphone, and many people open their emails on their phones rather than on their computers. Optimizing your emails for mobile devices is an absolute must to make sure your messages get through to as many customers as possible. 
• Set up email tracking: Tracking and analyzing your email marketing results is the only way to keep improving. Set up email tracking software before sending any messages so you get all the data and insights you need. 

With these basics in place, your emails will be much more likely to drive website traffic.

Craft emails that make people click 

Now, it’s time to actually create messages that your email subscribers can’t help but click on. From the subject line to the call-to-action button, you can optimize almost every element of your messages to increase the odds of readers clicking on your links.

Email structure best practices

The subject line is one of the first things your subscribers see when your email arrives in their inboxes. The more relevant and compelling it is, the more likely they are to open your message. Create email subject lines that stand out and appeal to your target audience. 

Inside the email, your body content should have a clear hierarchy. Structure your content so that the most important information catches the reader’s eye first. From there, the reader should be able to quickly scan the content and understand the most important points. Headers, images, and bullet points can help make your email more scannable.

Download and use the Anatomy of a Perfect Email to get an idea of what your messages should look like. The guide will help structure your messages no matter what subject you’re covering. 

Call-to-action (CTA) design

The call to action is arguably the most important part of the message, especially when you’re trying to drive website traffic with email campaigns. 

The CTA tells customers what to do next. If they want to engage with your content further, they click on the CTA and arrive on the designated landing page. The decisions you make about your CTA can have a huge impact on your click-through rate. Consider all your options, including:

• Using a CTA button vs hyperlinked CTA text
• Placing the CTA high in the email content or closer to the bottom
• Including just one CTA or multiple

You should also weigh different phrasing for your CTA. Generally, action-oriented language like “Shop now” or “Download your copy” is more persuasive than bland text like “deals here.” Try out several CTA strategies until you find the combinations that drive the most clicks. 

Psychology of the click 

So, what really makes someone take time out of their day to click on a link in your message? There are a few different motivations you can tap into when creating your marketing emails. 

• FOMO (Fear of Missing Out): The reader doesn’t want to miss their chance to take advantage of what you’re offering, so they click to learn more.  
• Curiosity gap technique: The curiosity gap is the difference between what someone knows and what they want to know. By teasing your readers with some of the information they want in your email content but not all of it, you can persuade them to click to learn the rest.  
• Social proof elements: Social proof is when people rely on other people’s actions to help guide their own. Showing social proof elements like customer testimonials or positive reviews can make readers trust you more, making them more inclined to click on links in your messages. 
• Urgency and scarcity: If you leverage a sense of urgency or scarcity, you can make readers feel like they have to take action right away to avoid missing out. For example, your subscribers will probably click on a link to see a deal that expires in 24 hours, more than one with no expiration date. 

Whatever psychological strategy you use to get readers to click on your email links, you need to clearly outline how clicking benefits them. A straightforward and clear value proposition is very persuasive. 

Link strategy and placement

Now it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty of optimizing the links in your emails to make them as clickable as possible. You’ll have to decide on key elements like link placement, anchor text, and landing page selections. 

Link placement

You’ve probably heard “location, location, location” about real estate sales. Well, location is crucial in email marketing, too. More specifically, where you place your links in your emails can make or break your click-through rate. 

One strategy is to include a CTA button near the top of the email. That way, even if the readers don’t bother to scroll through all the content, you can still get them to click the CTA. Another popular option is including a CTA button at the bottom of the content to stand out as a conclusion. 

Number of links

You also have to decide how many links to include. You can include multiple CTAs that go to the same landing page, links that go to different landing pages, or just one main link. 

Try to stick to one to three links to avoid overwhelming readers or triggering spam filters. If you want to include more links, using linked images rather than buttons or text can make your message easier to follow. 

Anchor text optimization

The words you hyperlink, also known as the anchor text, need to be relevant and persuasive — just like the text in a CTA button. Try to include keywords like “exclusive deals” or “shop now” that catch the reader’s attention to drive website traffic with email messages. 

Deep linking vs. homepage links

Consider your goals when deciding what pages to link to in your messages. Are you trying to increase interest in a new product? Or just generally increase audience engagement and boost web traffic?

If your campaign goals are broader, you may benefit from linking to your brand homepage. From there, customers can click around and browse whatever interests them most. 

If you have more specific goals, like boosting sales of a certain product line, add links that take your email subscribers right to those product pages. You want to make it as easy as possible for interested customers to find the information that’s relevant to them and complete conversions. 

Testing what works

You probably won’t write and design the perfect clickable email on the first try, but don’t worry. That’s what testing is for.  

A/B testing is when you compare two versions of something, in this case an email, to find out which performs better. You keep everything about the two versions the same except the one element you’re testing. 

For example, if you’re trying to see which anchor text leads to more clicks, the two emails you test would be identical, except for the different versions of the anchor text.  

Elements you may want to test in your email campaigns include:

• Subject line
• Link placement
• CTA button design and text
• Preheader text
• Number of links included

You can also examine the results of your previous campaigns to better understand what your audience responds to. With reporting insights, you can track all the data relevant to your email performance, from click rates to engagement levels to campaign comparisons. Moreover, you can identify and group similar contacts to deliver more personalized campaigns. 

Troubleshooting low click rates

If you’re not getting the click rates you want in your email campaigns, a few issues might be at play. People can only click on the links in your emails if they open the message first, so check whether your open rates are low. Use the average rates by industry as a benchmark. If your open rates are below the average, you may be able to boost your click rate with strategies like writing stronger subject lines or sending your messages when your target audience is most engaged. 

Another issue that may be contributing to your low click rates is not tailoring your messages enough. People click on links that are relevant to them, those that promise to answer a question or solve a problem. Writing an email relevant to everyone is impossible, so the best approach is segmenting your email list into smaller groups with shared characteristics. Once you segment your list, you can write more targeted messages with links that appeal to the audience. 

If you make these adjustments and still have low click rates, it may be time to redesign your approach. Go back to the brainstorming stage and change things around. Adjusting one detail, like your link placement, can sometimes make all the difference in boosting your click rates. 

Drive website traffic with email marketing campaigns 

Every marketing email you send should include at least one link. Whether that’s in the form of hyperlinked text or a CTA button, a link to your homepage or a product page, at the top of the message or the bottom — all these decisions depend on your goals for the campaign. Just don’t leave out a link. 

Once you send your messages with links, track them to see all the details about how many people click and which links get the most engagement. Then, use these insights to fine-tune your next campaign. You’ll keep learning what works and what doesn’t with your audience until you reach your click-through rate goal. 

Email tracking software like Constant Contact makes monitoring these details easy. In the convenient dashboard, you can get an engagement report for each message you send with the click rate and number of opens across devices. You can also see a heat map of which links in your message got the most clicks.