Issue #253 All About Email

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #253 of All About Email!

Last week, I returned to the CNIL and Garante tracking pixel story from Issues #238 and #239. The response to those two issues was bigger than I expected, and a lot of what's been written publicly since has left me with a nagging feeling that something important is being missed.

This week is my sixth guest author of the summer, Travis Hazlewood! Travis first appeared as a guest last summer with some serious Monkey Island feels and one of my most popular issues of this year!

He’s back with another treasure trove of an issue.

Let’s go, Travis! 👇

🚨 Like most marketers, you likely focus on important things like content and promotion choices…but you may be missing something you wouldn’t expect:

Over the last few months, I manually pulled apart real campaigns, account by account, send by send, hunting for what actually affects clicks.

💡 And what I found was surprising…not just because trends exist, but because the biggest trend is that the exceptions are also their own trends.

So, before you waste another minute changing the colour of your button, let’s see if you even need a button there in the first place.

Note: “Primary CTA” references the major CTA focal point of the content, usually the first button, while “Secondary CTA” references any other CTAs that follow

The pattern was remarkably consistent:

There are exceptions where I saw the gap shrunken between Primary and Secondary but never below Primary representing 30% of clicks. 

🚨 Interestingly enough, as I investigated those cases where Primary CTA clicks were 70-95% of total campaign clicks, I found many Primary CTAs were not actually visible upon email open. (aka, not “technically” above the fold).

What was more common than not:

And those campaigns performed just as well, seeing the same/similar click rates and distributions across Primary vs Secondary…

💡 Meaning, if you can get someone to open your email, they will likely give you up to that first button before deciding whether to continue or abandon the email.

Most people think either buttons or images work better in general, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

In many cases, link format preferences appear almost completely opposite for Primary vs Secondary CTAs.

And in the exception cases, Primary and Secondary CTAs trend consistently with a format preference relative to their own grouping.

🚨 The most important piece here isn't whether you should or shouldn’t use buttons, but that your audience is engaging with you in a trend you can predict and should adjust to.

💡 There is a deliverability caveat: More external domains in your content “can” mean more reputation risk. 

That said, senders with strong sending practices can routinely include 20+ links with zero issue. Reputation beats a link-count caveat every time.

As for the myth that too many links kill click rate, the only reason I’ve found is messy content formatting:

Presentation is basically the only limitation for Secondary CTAs here…

One interesting thing: Increasing the number of Secondary CTAs cannot save a weak-performing Primary CTA. Sure, they can nudge your numbers a bit…

💡 But in subscribers' minds, Secondary is always secondary.

Primary CTA performance is quite binary in what it can tell you (aka, it either does or does not go over well). Helpful, but only after you do a full-pitch with it.

Secondary CTAs are a different matter entirely.

🧠 Clickers at this level are more intentional and often show (when multiple Secondary CTAs are present) to be more obvious in their interests.

This makes Secondary CTAs the best place to test ideas for later Primary focuses:

Secondary CTAs can tell you that.

💡 If a majority were willing to scroll past other content to click a specific one, you can be more confident there's a genuine interest signal.

I plan to do a follow-up on this piece discussing some other interesting trends I’ve observed, but for now this will have to suffice.

Alright, enough theory. Here's what to actually do with it:

🧠 Do this for a couple of months and see what happens.

You’ll find that starting with your feet on the ground is actually the fastest way to get your content to fly.

And when you finally reach the clouds, please ping me on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear what you found.

✅ Whatever you got out of this, at least you can finally stop wasting time picking colours on buttons that didn’t have to be there in the first place.

​

A big thank you to Travis for this week’s guest post, and I will definitely be reading his follow-up piece in his own newsletter. 🎉

🚨 If there's one number to remember from this piece, it's this: your Primary CTA is doing almost all the work.

A few things worth considering on your next sends:

💡 Try this: swap your usual CTA format for a few sends and track whether Primary vs Secondary click share actually shifts.

See you next week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

** (Thank God, otherwise I’d be in big trouble…my link count is usually more than 30+ links. 😮‍💨)

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

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This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋