This question, whether all the text in a newsletter should be clickable, comes from one of our clients.
The answer was built collaboratively with the team!
Unanimously, we believe that LEFULLCLICCESTCOMMELEFULLCAPITALCESTLEMAL for the following reasons:
Philosophy
There is a certain parallel between this idea of making an email entirely clickable and the idea of sending "full base". The idea that the customer-consumer is just a cow from which we will always get more milk if we don't stop milking it is just an illusion. At best, the customer who feels abused and exploited will become inactive, at worst he will unsubscribe.
Technique
The multiplication of links in the email can lead to the addition of a LOT of code (tag <a /> + the tracked link). This can make the email approach the HTML weight limit of Gmail. And you don't want your newsletter to be truncated in this webmail. Monitor the weight of your newsletters !
Deliverability
If in itself, there does not seem to be any deliverability problem to have a lot of links in an email (but it would be nice to do an A/B test on a seedlist), in some cases (especially in B2B), we can end up with a huge mass of phantom clicks that will totally distort the click statistics. Phantom clicks are clicks made by some anti-spam filters that click on all the links of all the emails received.
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UX
On the user side, there is a high risk of unintentional clicks. By a false manipulation in mobile by scrolling down for example. The user clicks ("Touch" event on mobile) on the email in the text part, and leaves its reading. This leads to a poor user experience (UX). It is recommended to distinguish in an email, the text parts and the clickable elements (images, main CTA, secondary CTA, underlined hyperlinks).
Some best practices for your Call To Action links:
- A CTA in the main block of the email, always.
- Clear and explicit CTA naming: the wording of the link must be explicit and relate directly to the landing page with contextual information. Labels like "click here" or "read more" are clearly not semantic, nor is a full paragraph fully clickable. We will therefore prefer labels like "I register", "I download" ...
- A contrasting CTA color to the background color or background image.
- A main CTA with a font size of at least 18 px and a lateral and vertical padding around 15-20 px.
- A CTA is not an image containing textYes, even if you don't know how to integrate rounded edges !
Performance
If you compare newsletters with fully clickable text VS emails without fully clickable text, the click-through rate will most likely be better on the email with fully clickable text. But this click rate will be truncated by unsolicited clicks. As a consequence, we no longer distinguish between real intentional clicks (clicks desired by the reader) and accidental clicks. And on top of that, we get used to high click rates.
Test Test Test
Whenever you make a hypothesis in emaling, the best thing to do is to do a test to objectify the idea! You can do a series of two or three A/B tests on different types of emails. However, the winning indicator of this kind of test should probably be the conversion and not the click!
