Your Click Rate Is Fake (And Here's Why)
In this episode of the "Send It" podcast, hosts Jimmy Kim and Chase Diamond dissect the misconception that all clicks are equal in email and SMS marketing. They begin by outlining four distinct click types—high‑intent, curious, accidental, and bot clicks—and explain why treating them the same skews performance metrics. The conversation then critiques the limited data provided by typical ESPs, highlighting missing attribution, lack of individual‑level insight, and inflated click counts caused by automated link‑scanning bots from privacy tools and corporate firewalls. The hosts explore psychological drivers that generate intentional clicks—curiosity, urgency, perceived value, design clarity, and relevance—and contrast them with design pitfalls that produce accidental clicks. They stress the importance of segmenting audiences and aligning email content with landing‑page experiences to boost post‑click conversion. To address these challenges, they introduce eClickTrack, a branded link shortener and analytics platform built for e‑commerce marketers. eClickTrack offers deep post‑click data (attribution, bot filtering, geographic, device, and time‑based analytics), the ability to edit links after send, and branded URLs that increase trust. The episode also mentions Yahoo’s new Sender Hub for spam and deliverability insights, and sponsor shout‑outs for Omnisend and Inbox.ai. Finally, Jimmy and Chase present a six‑step playbook for improving click quality: (1) audit past campaigns, (2) implement granular tracking, (3) design intentional CTAs, (4) segment audiences, (5) monitor post‑click behavior, and (6) continuously test and iterate. The episode concludes with a reminder that click quality, not sheer volume, drives revenue.
Chapters
Not all clicks are created equal.
Yeah, and some clicks come from genuine curiosity and high intent, and others are accidental.
This is where brands make mistakes. They're optimizing for clicks, focusing on the highest number of clicks possible without actually having a true sense and understanding of what happens after the click.
Designing your email to drive intentional clicks, not accidental ones, like making sure it's really clear.
You know, actually knowing your actual click rate Not the inflated block click rate gives you a lot more reliability. So that way you can start modeling campaigns and kind of automations much better and much more accurately. Once you understand what's behind your clicks, you can start thinking and making better decisions. Like, you know, data is power. Knowledge is power.
From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it.
Yeah, you know you gotta send it.
Send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.
What is up everyone? Welcome back to Send It, where we discuss anything and everything retention marketing, specifically in email and SMS marketing and e-commerce. My name is Jimmy Kim and I'm here with my co-host Chase Diamond. All right, Chase, I want to start off with some industry news because I feel like it's been a while since we had any industry news, to be honest, and Yahoo recently just came out with their brand new, I guess, their insights around their spam and deliverability. We've talked about the Sender Hub before, but they're now finally getting better information and data signals around spam complaint rates and delivered messages inside of Yahoo's Sender Hub. So it's a free thing. Basically, you set it up just like your Google Postmaster, and now you'll be able to kind of see the last 7 days of data. Just like you can see on your Google. And I think this is Yahoo's way of moving away from the traditional old systems that they have and they're trying to elevate. So any thoughts?
Interesting. Cool. Got to go set it up here soon then.
Yeah, we got to go set it up and go check out what they're trying to report and maybe we'll learn something cool. Anyways, Chase, today's pod, we're going to talk about clicks because I believe not all clicks are created equal and we want to drill down into what it means to be A click, a click. So I'm going to start out with a question for you, Chase. You send an email campaign and you get a 4% click-through rate. Good or bad?
You're going to hate this answer. It's the classic email marketing answer, but it depends, right?
Exactly. That's exactly the answer I expected you to say. And that's what we're diving into today because most brands obsess over open rates, of course, but they tend to avoid thinking about the click-through rate.
Yep. Dude, our open rate went from 45 to 50%. We're crushing it. But their click rate is 0.1%, right? Like, it just doesn't make sense.
Yeah.
Because here's what no one talks about, right? Like you mentioned the very, very beginning, I'm going to steal your line. Not all clicks are created equal.
Yeah. And some clicks come from genuine curiosity and high intent and others are accidental. Some are bots. Some are people who never buy. But if you can't tell the difference, you're going to be optimizing for the wrong thing. So today, on today's pod, I want to break down what an actual click means, what driving a click, how to measure click quality, the problems with bot traffic, and how to get deeper analytics on your clicks. So this is the episode I hope we can change your view of email and SMS click reporting forever, because if you're celebrating a high open rate right now without understanding what or why or what's going on, then you're probably flying a little blind. So Let's start with the basics, Chase, and let's get people caught up. When someone clicks in an email or SMS, what is that actually happening?
Yeah, I guess technically speaking, at the very basic level, they're clicking some sort of hyperlink, right? Whether it's a link in it of itself, like whether it's kind of like text that's linked or maybe an image that's linked, right? And it's essentially gonna take them from your message, so your email or your text message, to your website. And then your kind of email provider or your SMS provider is gonna record that click as a click event. So, you know, it doesn't matter if it's Omnisend, Klaviyo, Attentive, Postscript, et cetera, et cetera. They all track clicks and they give you a click-through rate, which essentially is your clicks divided by the number of delivered messages.
But when we look at those clicks on those ESPs, the problem is all clicks are counted the same. Wouldn't you agree?
Yeah, exactly. And that's the problem, right? So whether someone clicks your hero image by accident or they click a specific product link with intent to buy, or hey, even like an issue that we see a lot, maybe a bot clicks your link to scan for spam. All of those show up as one click in your dashboard without much differentiation.
Yeah. So I always say the problem with it is that the metric is so surface level. It tells you that someone clicked, but not why or what happened next. So look, I want to, I want to dig into this deeper. I want to break down the types of clicks that people are getting because I think this is a good one because I don't think people realize that there are actually like several types of clicks. There's 4 of them actually. So type 1, I'll start with the easy one, but this is like the high-intent click. You want to explain that one, Chase?
Yeah, sure. So kind of doubling down here, this kind of high-intent click, this is your dream click, right? Someone reads your email or your text message, they see a product they want to buy. They click directly to the product page and they're ready to make a purchase.
Yeah. And this click, it's the one that drives the revenue. They've, you know, they have a problem, you offered a solution, and they click to learn, to learn more or make that purchase. So that's a really simple one to understand. The type 2, I think, is the next one I would say is the curious click. This is when someone who is interested but not really ready to buy, they click to browse to see what's new, maybe add to cart, but they don't purchase. Thoughts on that one?
Yeah, still very valuable. And it aligns a lot with what we talked about on the email side, all the different types of abandonment type flows. It's lower intent than type 1. They're earlier in the buyer journey, but it's still valuable.
Yeah. Okay. And then there's type 3. Type 3, I like this one because I don't think a lot of people think about this one. But I call this the accidental click, especially on mobile, right? This is huge on mobile. If you're sending all image email with one gigantic clickable block, And people fat finger, they're trying to zoom in, they're trying to do stuff and they end up clicking on it. You seen that before?
I feel like you're talking about me with those fat fingers accidentally clicking things to click and a little click happy, right? Yeah. Right. You know, people are scrolling their inbox, their phone, you know, your thumb, their thumb, whatever hits the email or text, it registers as a click, but they immediately bounce. So it's fairly useless.
Yeah. And your ESP says click, but the person never actually saw your website, which is also a problem. And then the 4th type I think that, that is happening more than ever these days is the bot click. And that one's becoming kind of a massive problem in this market.
Yeah, dude.
And it's something that I personally have faced myself on my own newsletters and my clients and your clients, right? So have it be kind of email security systems, spam filters, privacy tools, now click every link in your email. Before it even reaches the inbox, right?
Yeah.
The harsh truth is very simple. If your click rate looks amazing, but half those clicks are from bots scanning or phishing links or malware, well, that's probably a problem.
Yeah. And for whatever reason, you know, ESPs, doesn't matter who you use, SMS providers, et cetera, you know, you really cannot tell the difference unless you have deeper tracking set up and built out.
Okay. All right. So look, we know the different types of clicks. Those are pretty easy to understand, but let's talk about what makes the— let's talk about what makes someone click in the first place. Because if you understand psychology, you can design an email and SMS that drives high-quality clicks. So first driver, in my opinion, is curiosity. People click whenever they want to know more. Thoughts on that?
Yeah, I'm with you. You know, that's why kind of mystery and intrigue works so well in the subject line and preview text.
Yeah, like, it's like thinking like, you won't believe what we dropped, dot, dot, dot, or this sold in 4 hours last time. Those are good ones.
Yeah, 100%. And here's the thing, I'd say kind of curiosity clicks, while they're clicks, and there is intent there, the intent tends to be kind of a little bit lower, right? Typically, they're more interested in browsing and kind of just viewing, and a little bit less so in terms of purchasing and buying.
Yeah. And if all your clicks are driven by curiosity, your conversion rate will be low.
Exactly. So while curiosity can help drive the click, you know, value ultimately is what gets the purchase.
Yeah. Talking about value, let's go to a second one that I see often, which I think works really well for a click, is urgency. Time-limited offers, low stock warnings, deadlines, things like that.
Yeah, it shows up a lot, right, in e-commerce under sale ends tonight, or hey, we only have 3 left in stock. So these are more focused on driving, I guess, what we'd call kind of action-oriented clicks.
Yeah.
Talking about, I mean, BFCM's right around the corner. There's gonna be a lot of emails around these urgency clicks with higher, and the people who click on 'em will have higher intent, right? Because the people are thinking, I need to act now or I'll miss out.
Hey, it's Chase. Got 30 quick seconds? We built something specifically for you. Jimmy and I together have over 20 years of combined experience in email marketing. And we finally put everything together in one place, and it's called Ecom Email Certified. I know it's fancy, but it's gonna be great. Whether you're brand new or running campaigns for 7, 8, 9-figure brands, it covers it all. You know, deliverability, AI, copywriting, design, strategy, SMS, literally everything. Has over 175 total modules totaling 25+ hours of content. It even has quizzes, a community, and you're gonna get a real certification. It's way better than college, right? Don't tell your professor that, but it is. And we've designed it to take you from beginner to certified expert. We're talking about the kind of marketer who actually moves the needle and drives real revenue. Check it out at ecomemailcertified.com. And now back to the pod. Exactly. And that, that's the key difference between this and kind of the previous one is they're not casually browsing as much as they're actually in decision mode where That's what they're doing here.
Yeah. And that leads me to the third one. You just mentioned it earlier, but value. People click when they perceive value or benefit from whatever you're selling them.
Yeah. And I think that shows up in a couple of different ways. I'd say like in e-com, things like here's a discount, get 20% off, or even someone, you know, a merchant that doesn't offer free shipping doing something like, hey, today and today only you get free shipping, something that's just a clear value proposition.
Yeah, but it's not just discounts, Chase. I would say it's also things like, like early access to something exclusive, educational content that they want, or a product that solves a specific problem.
Dude, 100%. And these kind of like value-driven clicks, I think they tend to convert better because the person already sees the benefit before they actually even click.
Yeah, that makes sense. All right, let's go to the 4th one, which I think is something that we put 4th, even though I know some people would put this on the top, but it's design where you place the button, how you style the links, the visual hierarchy and things like that.
Yeah, dude, that's right. Like if your call to action button is buried at the bottom in tiny text, you will not get clicks unless you're driving bot clicks, right? And those don't matter as we know. But if it's big, if it's bold, if it's above the fold, if it, you know, all those types of things, clicks inherently will increase and go up.
Yeah, but that's also when the accidental click comes in and the entire email is clickable like a giant image. This is where the Image-only emails are not great in my opinion. People will click by accident. Have you seen this before?
Dude, we see it all of the time. Like you'd be surprised how often and how common this is. You know, brands send this really beautiful all-image email and they're getting a click-through rate of like 6% and they're, they're, they're, you know, virtual high-fiving each other if they're in office, right? Maybe they're doing it in person, but their bounce rate on the, the lander or the website is In the ballpark of 85 to 90% because most clicks were again, you know, accidents.
Yeah. So the lesson here is design for intentional clicks. Use clear, specific CTAs. Don't make your whole email one giant link. All right. The last one I think which is really important is relevance. People click when content speaks directly to them. If I bought skincare product from you before and you send me an email about your new skincare line, I'm way more likely to click than if you send me an email about men's grooming at that point.
Yeah, and that's why segmentation is so important, right? The more relevant the message, the higher the quality and potentially the quantity, but more often than not, higher the quality of your click.
No, that's exactly on point. And because a click from someone who's actually interested in what you're selling is worth 10 times more a click than someone who has randomly clicked out of boredom. All right. Look, I think we've kind of hit all that stuff, but here's where the big problem is, right? Your ESPs, right? You only get that surface-level data. I'm picking on everybody equally right now.
Yeah, it doesn't matter whether you're the Omnisends of the world who we absolutely love and adore, or the Klavios, the MailChimps, Attentive, etc. They all tell you quite limited things, right? A, how many people clicked? B, I guess which links got clicked? And C, Maybe what device they use, but that's typically like kind of the end-all be-all.
Yeah. But they don't tell you this. They don't tell you where the person's located. They don't tell you what time they clicked and when the email was sent, whether they've converted after clicking. I mean, sometimes they do, but it's always a little gray, right? With view attribution.
Yeah.
How many times they've clicked on it. And I think the biggest one that I think a lot of people are seeing is whether it was bot or human.
Yeah. And I feel like potentially they give those things that you mentioned in aggregate, but it's never on like an individual level where you can segment or you can actually learn, right? And I think this is really where it leads brands kind of astray. And this is where brands make mistakes. You know, they're optimizing for clicks, focusing on the highest number of clicks possible without actually having a true sense and understanding of what happens after the click.
Yeah. I mean, that's attribution, right? I mean, I think this one's an interesting one. And, you know, the reality is that most ESPs, they track the click and they have They have like an attribution model, but there's so many like gray areas around there. And sometimes you'll rely on a third party like Google Analytics or one of the third-party tools that are out there to check on that track. And it just gets really muddy because all the data's all over the place and you can't see the true impact of that email sometimes because there's so many things that are coming into place.
Yeah.
And I get it, right? Their goal isn't to be honed in on a specific click, right? Their goal is to be a little bit more of a generalist than a specialist there. And I think like with this, right? Like say someone clicks on your email on their phone at 2:00 PM, right? But they don't buy until they're on a laptop. Let's call it 8:00 PM. Your ESP might not, you know, probably not going to attribute that sale to your email.
Yeah. So you don't, so if you don't think that email didn't work, but it actually did, right? That's like the challenge that you have and you just can't see it sometimes.
Yep, exactly right. And I think this is like why unified tracking is so important. You have to be able to connect the click to the conversion all in a single place.
Yeah. So let's talk about bot clicks because I think it's getting worse out there. We've got Apple Mail privacy, Google link scanning, corporate firewalls. All these systems are now pre-checking links and scanning for security threats, which I get, right? That's important. So when you send an email, bots click, might click on every link before a human even opens that email.
Yeah.
Yeah. And your ESP, right, reports those as real clicks. You know, your dashboard says 100 clicks in the first 5 minutes, but unfortunately 60 of them are bots.
Chase, how do you know that though?
That's, that's a great question. Unfortunately, right now with most ESPs, you don't and you can't. They just count clicks. They don't actually filter out the bot traffic.
So you're basically, your click rates are inflated and you're making decisions based on like fake data ultimately, right?
Yeah. Unfortunately, you know, you might think a subject line or offer is really crushing it, but really you're just getting hammered and hammered by bot clicks. Again, I've, I've been there. I've, I've had this happen to me. It sucks.
Yeah. It's, it's quite interesting in that, you know, what's, what's interesting about that is it makes me think about like, I send a campaign out and I get like 500 clicks and then, you know, oh wait, wait, no, no, that's right. So you send that out and then you get like, you know, 500 clicks overnight and you're just like, what the heck? Right? And then you're like, no, nothing sold. And then you start going backwards. It's really confusing with bot clicks, but here's another one that made me start thinking And I kind of mixed ideas together, but you send a campaign, you get 500 clicks, and then you send the wrong product or the wrong link.
Yeah. I'm trying not to laugh because I've certainly been there. I know you have too. And I would say across like the thousands of brands that we're subscribed to across our different types of emails, do we probably see maybe one of those a day, if not more? Like they happen all of the time. They're very easy to mess up.
Yeah. So look, with most CSPs, you can't change a link after you send and it's out there. You can't send a correction and you either have to send us like correction email or send like an accepted loss, right? Like you just have to let it go. And sending a correction email kind of makes you look sloppy. I know some of these oops emails are all right, but a lot of people have already clicked and bounced and they're probably not coming back. So you need a way to edit links post-link. Okay, Chase, I feel like we're there, right? So we've laid out the problem with click tracking. Now let's talk about solutions. Hey, it's Jimmy, and I've got 30 seconds to tell you something that will change how you get inspired on your very next marketing campaign. You know when you're screenshotting those emails in your inbox and Slack and pasting them in here? You saw it on Twitter, trying to remember what brand did that killer Black Friday sequence. Well, guess what? Inbox.ai just solved that. It's an AI-powered database with over a million real emails from the best DTC brands. Ridge, Fenty Skin, Casper. They're all in there. You can search by promotional type, journey stages, whatever you need. Get AI breakdowns of what worked and why, track your competitors, and even request brands that are not in there. No more hunting through screenshots or saved folders. Inbox.ai turns your inspiration into revenue. Check it out at inbox.ai, link in the show description.
Yeah, this is going to be fun. This is something that I've been using for my own newsletter, something that you've been using, something that you've actually developed for quite a while in a different industry. And really realized the problem still exists within e-commerce. So full transparency, this is something that we've been working on. This is something that we've been building. This is something that has solved our own problems. This is something that I kept banging my head against the wall. Like, Jimmy, I need to solve for this. You're like, dude, I got you. And it's called eClickTrack. So essentially what eClickTrack is, is it's a couple of things. Number one, it's a branded link shortener and it's an analytics platform designed specifically for e-commerce brands. who do email and/or SMS, AKA all of you listening or watching this, right? And really the core idea is simple. Every link in your email or SMS should go through eClickTrack. So instead of linking to your Shopify product page, you use basically an eClickTrack link. And essentially what happens here is because the link goes through our system, we capture way more data than your ESP can. Again, ESPs are generalists. We are specializing in a really niche, weird thing around click tracking. We are obsessed with it. And the reason being, it's so, so important. So with that, Jimmy, what data can people actually get with eClickTrack? Do you mind breaking that down?
Yeah, for sure. First, look, attribution from click to conversion. Since we integrate with Shopify and your ESP, we can tell who clicked, what they clicked on, whether they purchased, how much they spent, all the revenue markers and dollars and numbers.
Yeah. So with this, right, you're not guessing whether an email drove revenue. You can actually see it directly.
All right, and the second thing that you can do is bot filtering. We can detect and filter bots so that you're not seeing human engagement. And into the future, what we're working on right now is we're making the ability to segment those bots and send it right back to your ESP so that you can segment away from those people and not send wasted credits ultimately.
This was huge for me personally. I think it's gonna be huge for a lot of people. It really gave me kind of the aha moment of understanding what was happening with my clicks, because I had, I had the hunch for a long time, irrespective of every and any ESP I used, that there were bot clicks happening and I just couldn't see it the way that I wanted to. Right. So, you know, actually knowing your actual click rate, not the inflated bot click rate, gives you a lot more reliability so that way you can start modeling campaigns and kind of automations much better and much more accurately. Yeah.
The third one that we thought about was location data. We show you exactly where those clicks are coming from.
100%. So if you're running like a specific geo-targeted campaign, or if you're a local brand, you can see if your audience is actually in the target area that you're hoping and aiming for.
Okay. Another one for you, Chase. The 4th one I think about is device and browser data. You'll be able to see what kind of devices people are using, what browsers and what operating systems.
Dude, 100%. And this is going to help you optimize your site experience. So, you know, a lot of obviously clicks come from mobile for most audience. However, I've kind of been surprised by seeing for some of the older audiences how much come from like a tablet or desktop. So, and obviously the inverse is true for kind of younger brands. So you might have 70% of your clicks on mobile, but maybe your conversion rate's only 2%. So you now maybe realize that you could improve your UX on mobile. Maybe that's like the low-hanging fruit and kind of the takeaway from it.
Yep. All right. Here's the 5th one that I think about, which was time-based analytics. You can see when people click, not Like, like not just that they clicked, but when people clicked.
Exactly. So if you send an email that's called at 10:00 AM, but most clicks happen at 8:00 PM, that tells you something about the way in which your audience is behaving.
No, it tells you a lot of things. And lastly, this is like the biggest game changer. The reason we all did it and why we built this in-house for ourselves is you can edit links after you send.
Exactly. So no more oops or we messed up or, you know, the intern screwed this one up, right? Even though it was you, the marketer, the CEO, You're blaming your dog or the intern. So if you accidentally send the wrong link in the product, you just go into our platform, the eClickTrack platform, and you just change the destination URL. No one will ever know that you messed up because you can change it after you've done it on the fly, on the go. And anyone who clicks the link from that point forward, once you change it, will go to the correct page that you actually intended. Yeah, no correction email needed. So basically, right, we're solving all those Oops-proof campaigns that you're not going to have to ever send or think about anymore.
Yeah, I just, I just texted Ray over at Seen the other day because he actually sent an oops email and I sent him a picture of it and said, if you use this tool, you don't have to ever do this again. And he was like, I need to sign up right now. So very much something that everyone goes through, the best of us, no matter what. All right. One more thing. E-ClickTrack uses branded short links. So if you're using this ugly Bitly link or long Shopify links, your links look like this. Like e.yourlink.com or whatever you want to make it, right? Just make it on brand and you can use it for your SMS too, which is really cool. And it helps you build trust. People are more likely to click on a branded link than a random short URL. People don't trust those spammy links. And if you can customize the slug by every campaign, so it's memorable and on brand, it also helps you because it's another touchpoint of it. So with that, Chase, let's talk about how brands actually use this. Let's build some case studies here. You want to— you have some, I think you wrote, and I have a couple. Yeah.
And one last thing I think about on the branded side, I know obviously we're retention marketers, we're talking more about email, SMS, et cetera, but these also look great and we use 'em a lot on social as well on our personal accounts to track, you know, the platform, the kind of campaign. I use a lot of like Instagram swipe up stories and I know a lot of brands do as well. And even just putting the links in bios, like all of this looks good, looks great, and it'll help you identify from social. Exactly what's happened, because there's a lot of issues there as well that, you know, most people aren't solving for. So that said, let's talk about this kind of more so focused now on kind of email and SMS. So let's talk about kind of the first use case being identifying bot traffic. So let's say you send out a campaign, let's keep the numbers easy. Let's say it drives 500 clicks in the first hour, but you're gonna see pretty quickly, for example, with eClickTrack, you're gonna see it being filtered out for 200 bot clicks. So now you're gonna be understanding the difference, right? The 500 clicks sub the 200 bot clicks shows you the 300 legitimate real engagement clicks that you otherwise would never have known.
Yeah. Super simple. That's a good use case. Another one that I know that is, as I've kinda mentioned it, is the wrong link fix, which you just said, right? You can send that Black Friday email out, accidentally linked last year's sales page, you catch in 10 minutes and boom, you just log in and change it. Crisis averted. Real simple.
Dude, I think for a period of time like BFCM, when you're just moving so fast, things are gonna inherently break, right? This has happened to us more times than we'd like to admit, just because like we're doing 100 things at once. Missing the, the link is a very easy thing to miss. So this, like you said, is gonna allow you to not mess up, or if you do mess up, you're gonna be able to fix it, you know, in a, in a very quick amount of time.
Yep. No, I get it. All right. So. Whether you're using eClickTrack or not, let's not talk about that anymore. Let's talk about how you optimize for click quality. I think instead of just click rate, click quality is something you need to think about. What do you think about that, Chase?
Yeah, that sounds great. Enough shilling. Let's talk about this. So, because once you understand what's behind your clicks, you can start thinking and making better decisions. Like, you know, data is power. Knowledge is power.
Yeah. All right. So let's, let's break this down. So first, we're going to look at click rate as a primary metric because it's really important, right? So instead of tracking the click rate, we're going to look at click-to-conversion, click-to-revenue or revenue per click, revenue per campaign. I think these are the ones that you think about.
Yeah, let's talk about those. I think those show you whether or not your clicks are actually valuable.
Yeah. And then secondly, it's design, right? Designing your email to drive intentional clicks, not accidental ones, like making sure it's really clear.
Yeah. And you could do that through things like specific CTAs. And instead of having like a giant clickable image, just use clear buttons with really kind of action-oriented text.
So you're saying things like shop the collection or get 20% off now and tell people exactly what they're clicking on, right?
Yeah, that's right. And don't have like 100 CTAs, please. You really do need to limit the number. If you have 10 links in one email, you're really gonna be diluting the focus and it's not gonna help anyone.
I know, but you know, as marketers, we all fall into that trap, Chase. I mean, I know the rule is one primary CTA, maybe one secondary, keeping it simple, but God, it's so hard to think about it that way. Hey, quick 60-second break to shout out our title sponsor, Omnisend. If you don't know them, Omnisend is an all-in-one email and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce. They've trusted by over 155,000 merchants with a 4.8 rating star on Shopify's marketplace with over 2,800 100+ reviews. People love using them. Their support is incredible, responsive team, great help docs, and they actually show up when you need them. 3, look, everyone loves saving a buck. They've got great features and great pricing. Listen, I've heard this inside the community that someone actually dropped their bill by almost 50% and then included their SMS cost, which is absolutely wild. Another agency that we talked to shifted all his clients over when he discovered that he saved them 30 to 60% off of their actual monthly bill. And they're taking that money now reinvesting into ads. And that real money is going to come back into your pocket too, because you're helping them out or, you know, whatever it might be. You know, with all this, I literally just helped Chase migrate his personal list to Omnisend not too long ago. It was super easy. They got team, they have an automated solution. It's really great. So if you're looking to scale your email and SMS game, check out omnisend.com/sendit. Tell them Chase and Jimmy sent you. Now back to your pod.
It is hard. A lot of us get a little click happy and we want to have all these CTAs because we want to drive all these clicks, right? Yeah. Moving on to the third, it's really important obviously, right, that you segment your campaigns so your clicks come from people who actually care and are actually relevant. Don't batch and blast your whole list. Don't send to people who, you know, don't show any interest. Only send to people who've shown interest. In that specific product category or that price point or that content, whatever that might be. Because at the end of the day, 100 relevant clicks are going to drive night and day more revenue than 500 random clicks.
Yeah, that's a good one. All right. 4th one I've got is whenever you're using the analytics of whatever tool you're using, your ASP data, your Google Analytics, your Shopify, or tools like eClickTrack, look for patterns. What type of campaigns drive the highest click-to-conversion rate? What subject line is leading to the most valuable click and Test based on quality, not volume. If a subject line gets fewer clicks but higher conversion, that's really your winner because you're driving better intent.
100%. And then the, the 5th one, right, is like you need to account for bot traffic in your reporting. I think it's something that a lot of people aren't doing and aren't aware of. And, you know, rightfully so, they don't realize that this is an issue in the first place. So if you can, you know, if you can't automatically filter it, At least be aware that your click rate is inflated, right? We're not being mean. We're not trying to be bullies. Like, that's just the truth, right? And when you're testing, you do need to look at conversion data, not just clicks, because bots don't buy. At the end of the day, humans are the ones that do purchase.
Yeah. And I'll add one last one to this is track what happens after the click bounce rates, time on site, pages per session, add to cart rate. If the people click but immediately bounce, you might have like a relevance problem ultimately, either your email Promised something that the site didn't deliver or your landing page kind of sucked.
Yeah, dude. And if you fix the disconnect, things are going to be so much better. So if you can get your email message to match your landing page experience, it's going to be so much better.
Yep. All right. Quick, quick closeout of the playbook for improving click quality. This is kind of your playbook. All right. I'm going to give you like a simple 6-step playbook. All right. So one, you want to audit your current clicks. You want to pull your reports, look at your last 10 campaigns, look at the click rate, the conversion rate, and the higher Revenue per email, and then you want to identify which campaigns have the highest and lowest, right? So now that's number one. Then you want to implement better tracking, right? This is where tools like eClickTrack come in, but make sure you're just using good tracking of something so you can actually connect what happens from the email to the end, a UTM and Google Analytics, whatever it is, right? The step three from this lesson here is designing your intentional click. Clear CTAs. 1 to 2 per email and make sure it's really clear and you don't get the accidental ones, right? Step 4 is really easy. It's really just segmenting. If you send better targeted emails, you're just going to get better targeted results. And then step 5 is the post-click monitoring that, checking for bounce rates and add-to-cart values and measure conversion rates, not just click rates. And last but not least, to all of these things, always make sure you're testing and iterating. Remember, A 2% click rate that converts at 8% is way better than a 6% click rate that converts at 1%.
Quality over quantity, always, right? Yeah.
That's why I called this episode All Clicks Are Not Created Equal today.
I love it. Hey, and if you want to click, kind of check out eClickTrack and all of that, if that sounds cool, which again, we're biased, but it is, you know, see how you can find kind of deeper click analytics. For your brand, for your clients' brands, right? Great thing for agencies and freelancers as well on behalf of their clients. Go over to eclicktrack.com.
Yeah. And if you're just starting to think about click quality, man, I would recommend pull your last 10 campaigns and see which ones actually drove revenue. And you might be actually really surprised by that. I don't think people do that exercise enough. All right, cool. Well, with that, guys, that's a wrap. Not All Clicks Are Created Equal: The Truth About Email and SMS Clicks. If you enjoyed today's pod, Please make sure you subscribe, follow, listen, leave us a rating, all that good stuff. And you can follow us everywhere: X, LinkedIn, YouTube, IG, TikTok, etc. I'm sticking to one CTA today, Chase, and I'm going to say you should check out inbox.ai. inbox.ai. It's our brand new tool. It's now live. You go check it out. Get inspired if you need some inspiration for your Black Friday. Everything else about what we do, our show notes, how to connect with us, our newsletter, products. We got in the show notes below. With that being said, we'll see you next week.
From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far, or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.
