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While facts and figures might seem to be the ‘boring’ stuff, this is important for you to know about for the success of your business. This podcast takes a look at how you can increase the click-through rates for your website, including email click through rate and Google click through rates; but first, what have Andrew and Heather found cool and exciting this week?
This week Heather has been playing with a WordPress theme called Premium Press. She has been using the ‘Classifieds’ theme which is where you can easily build your own classifieds website and have people list their stuff for sale. What kind of business might use this? Well our example is a community site; people can post listings for events like a community board, you can even have them do this for free.
Andrew has been playing with his new iPad. He has found an app called Reflector which will mirror or ‘reflect’ whatever is on the screen of your iPad or iPhone and put it up on your computer screen. It also allows you to record things; for example you could record your screen as people do to produce ‘cheat’ videos for getting through game levels, then upload to YouTube.
Improving click through rate
So down to click-through rates; what is a click-through rate? Simply put, it is the number of people out of the total who receive and open your email that click the link and go through to your website. It is important to know about this because it tells you 1) how engaged your audience is and 2) how willing they are to take action.
Email click through rate
Of course, if you are spending time composing and sending out emails, you want to ensure that they are effective! (And yes, it generally is a good idea to include some kind of clickable link in all of your emails as you want to train people to be clicking on your links – even if it is just to your Facebook page, as this is how they know they can engage with you). Did you know there is a formula you can use to make sure your emails are effective?
One of the key things about emails is that they should be about building relationships with your list over time. The formula that we have had success with is that all emails should do at least one of three things;
- Build rapport
- Define you as an authority/ build credibility
- Give value
The first thing to do is to keep in mind that your free gift offer is very important. One thing we have found is that you don’t want to give everything away at once. For example, if you have 10 video steps, then drip-feed them out over a couple of weeks. People are often overwhelmed if greeted with too much information at once so bite-sized chunks is the key. Also, when introducing your 10 part series, make sure you let people know it will be coming out in bites so to look out for your emails in their inbox! You could also create anticipation by letting them know you will give away a great bonus in two weeks time or whenever you have decided.
So the key point is to break it into stages;
- Stage 1 – the initial introduction and giving away of your free gift. NO SELLING at this stage. (First two weeks and email every couple of days).
- Stage 2 – building rapport and credibility. For example share case studies and tell your studies. This is the next two weeks, send an email every 3-4 days. You can start some ‘light’ selling at this stage but don’t be surprised if you don’t get a large response at this stage.
- Stage 3 – if they’re still there, they like you! Give more value-add and continue to build rapport. This is weeks 5 and 6.
- Stage 4 – the loyalty stage. This is where you can offer more value and should start to see loyal followers buy your stuff. Weeks 7 onward.
Google click through rate
There is another aspect to click-through rates; that is click-throughs from Google rankings. This is where people click-through as a result of what they are presented with in a Google search. The key thing here is that you want to ensure the ‘snippet’ (sentence or two beneath the headline that gives an idea of what your website will provide) is sending the right message. You can control the snippet; for example there are plug-ins available if you use WordPress. We use Yoast SEO but there are also plug-ins such as All In One SEO pack that also allow you to control the snippet. You can even change it to be a ‘call to action’ if you wish. If you are using a company to do your SEO, make sure you talk to them and ask about ensuring that your Google snippets are what you want them to be.
Look out for further podcasts on how to improve your website stats, and make sure you take some kind of action to improve yours!
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