Effects of link placements in email newsletters on their click-through rate

Abstract

Firms adopting email marketing strategy often complain about low click-through rate (CTR). Scarcity of attention in this digital economy requires including psychological aspects of consumer behavior into the design considerations of digital contents. In this study, we propose differential effects of link placements in email newsletter on their CTR. We explain the observed effects of link placements on CTR drawing concepts from psychology and visual heuristics. The empirical analysis confirms that when it comes to clicking on the links of a newsletter, the click-through follows a U-pattern, i.e. as users traverse the links placed on a U-path their responsiveness decreases gradually. Thus, links placed in the left region of an email newsletter have higher impact than those placed in the right region with links in the top-left region having highest impact. Insights gained from this study can be used in the design consideration of email newsletters.

Keywords:

• Email marketing
• link placement
• visual heuristics
• SNARC effect

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Liana Technologies for providing the data for this study. We also thank Foundation for Economic Education (Liikesivistysrahasto) for supporting this research work through generous academic grant.

Notes

1. www.lianatech.com.

2. We also operationalize click-through rate as ratio of total number of clicks to the total opens (i.e. the total number of unique individual users who actually opened a particular email campaign). We do not find any significant difference in model parameter estimates to this alternate operationalization.

3. Visual hierarchy is the order that the human eye follows when recognizing what it observes.