What makes a compelling email for a technology company?

So you have a small technology company and need to make personal connections in order to bring in new business. You are probably using email to get visitors to your website, right? If you don’t have an ecommerce site, the question is why? It is extremely unlikely that even the very few people that click thru to the site are going to fill out a request for contact or engage in live chat (you do need these tools just in case, though).

The truth is, if strategically designed, it is fairly easy to get a high open rate, but click thru rates are another story. There are reasons for this that have nothing to do with the strength of the email. For example, more people are opening emails on mobile devices that make it less convenient to click through to a site and go back to checking email.

Some people say that a click thru indicates a level of interest. But there is actually stronger indicator in the open report. Look at people that opened the email more than once and look at the amount of time that elapsed between opens. For example, someone that opened an email at 2:32 p.m. and 5:15 p.m. (indicating that the person was interested enough to save it to read later) is a much stronger lead than someone that opened it a 2:32 p.m. and 2:33 p.m. (although it could be a forward).

Emails designed for click thrus, typically have very little info and include hooks designed to entice people to click through to the website—i.e. the promise of an informational article, a giftcard drawing, or just “read more” of whatever is in the email.

Since most people are not going to click thru no matter what you do, my advice is to make a complete business case in the email itself and follow up personally with promising openers.