What’s an Email “Click Map” and Why it Matters

For certain emails, the main purpose is branding. The goal of these emails is very high distribution and are traditionally evaluated using open rate as the primary metric.

In these cases, open rate gives us marketers a good idea of the reach of the email. Obviously everyone who opened the email didn’t read it, but it’s the best we can do.

At FranchiseHelp and in franchise lead generation in general, branding is not often the purpose of emails. It’s actual engagement and action!

(If you want to discuss email strategy, shoot us a note)

In these instances click-through rate is a way more effective measurement of success.

The big number that you’ll be looking at is the number of people who clicked, but there’s an additional question to be asked, “What did they click?”

In any given email, it’s usually a good strategy to give people the opportunity to click lots of different things. Not just one.

Here’s an example of an email we sent about health and senior care opportunities:

In the email, a reader can click on “Be Your Own Boss,” the image in the header, the credibility logo, the “See The List Now >” button, or the “Find the right opportunity for you” text.

Here’s what the breakdown of clicks actually looked like:

If you would have asked me to guess, I would have guessed that 100% of people would’ve clicked the button. Why did they click the other things?

Anyway, look at this click map when we sent out a newsletter:

So why does all this matter?

In terms of describing past performance, not much. Your boss isn’t going to care much about whether someone clicked the logo or the text or the button. All he / she is going to care about is revenue.

However, in terms of optimizing campaigns moving forward, it can mean everything. By looking at a click map, you can get real information on what people care about. In that newsletter example, the story about the woman in San Francisco seemed to have resonated with our audience. Immediately, we started asking ourselves how we could provide more content like that. (Of course, that article was at the top, so it’s not the cleanest finding.)

For the healthcare email, I always want to shoot for a very high button click percentage. It is the primary call to action in the email, so that’s really what I want someone to click. If we’re getting other clicks, I’d attribute it more to random variation rather than FranchiseHelp doing a better job marketing.

Email marketing is all about optimization over time. Each individual email is too small of sample size to evaluate the success of a specific strategy. Heck – a month of emails is probably not even enough to evaluate.

It’s important to keep an eye on things like the click map, to give yourself an idea how things are changing and give yourself ideas of what to do differently in the future.

Wanna chat about email click maps, shoot us a note.