MarketingSherpa (a leading publisher of marketing case studies) recently considered whether the wording used in email newsletter hyperlinks (i.e., the "read more" links that take readers from the "teaser" summaries in your email newsletter to the full articles on your website) makes a difference in clickthrough rates.
The answer, they found, is "yes." In fact, an experiment revealed that using the right words in the hyperlinks in your email newsletters or alerts can boost clickthroughs by more than 8%. Click the link below to learn what they found.
Note: you can easily run the same test on your own law firm email newsletters or alerts if you are using email marketing software that allows multivariate testing where you split your lists into random "nth name" segments and distribute different versions of the relevant newsletter or alert to each segment.
As with other publishers, MarketingSherpa's email newsletters include "teasers" that summarize the subject of an article in 2-3 short paragraphs and then include a hyperlink that allows readers to click through to read the full article on MarketingSherpa's website. MarketingSherpa had been using the phrase "continue here" in those hyperlinks, but wasn't sure that was the best phrase to maximize clickthroughs.
So they tested clickthrough rates on four common phrases:
- "Continue here"
- "Click to continue"
- "Continue to article"
- "Read more"
MarketingSherpa found that "Click to continue..." performed the best - boosting clickthroughs by 8.53% over the others. They surmised that a phrase like "read more" didn't do as well because e-newsletter subscribers tend to skim content rather than read it, and so using a phrase that reminds subscribers of an activity they are instinctively avoiding would logically not be as effective.
Access the full case study here (subscription required) (note: readers commenting on the study noted that link labels that work in email newsletters may not necessarily work as well on websites where readers do tend to stick around to "read" the content more thoroughly rather than skimming. In fact, one study found that the phrase "click here" is a poor choice for a link label on a website).
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