Here’s our latest round of expert tips from leaders at best-in-class agencies. This time, we asked 4 experts on how they maximize click-through rates for marketing messages and social media ads.
Conversion Advocates

Sina Fak, Partner at Conversion Advocates:
The top 3 things that help improve marketing messages are timing, the flow of the message and storytelling using open loops.
Timing is really important because you have a window of opportunity when your customers are engaged and are thinking about your product. If you’re able to tie your message to be relevant to them in that moment, then you’re going to have a better click-through rate. Recart is a great example of a tool that allows you to time your marketing messages effectively.
If you want to increase the click-through rate and the conversion rate of your marketing message, you need to make sure that what you’re communicating at each step makes sense. If you communicate one call-to-action, and then send a message about another thing, and it’s not relevant, then that’s going to create friction. The flow of your marketing messages needs to be consistent.
The first two things were strategic, the third is very tactical: Using some form of open loop. Open loop is a storytelling tactic, basically like a cliffhanger. When you listen to a story, at the end of every TV episode or chapter of a book, there is a cliffhanger when you go “I need to know what is next”. An open loop entices action from your customers, so that’s a really powerful tactical tool that you can use to improve click-through rates and conversion rates of your messages.
Cubatica

Joshua Bretag, Advisor & Growth Specialist at Cubatica:
In the context of Facebook ads, and just ads in general, you want to have a scroll-stopper. Something that is shocking, and goes against the grain of what’s known to be the way things are, will get people to stop scrolling and pay attention.
Especially on Facebook, everyone uses the same styled images, without actually thinking about the fact that when people are scrolling through their feed, you need to make them stop. You have to do something a bit more creative, a bit more fun. The copy has maybe 20%
A quick improvement is simply increasing the contrast of the images by 40%. It makes them pop more in the feed, so it makes people just stop for a second and have a look at it. Same is true for 3D images on Facebook.
Localized images showing the country’s flag or a famous person from that location works really well as well.
Advertising from influencers, instead of your own brand can really
Having a personality and standing for something always works as well. You don’t want to be just a brand that agrees with everyone. That’s what brings your tribe towards you and that’s what gets you better click-through rates.
Milk Bottle Labs

Keith Matthews, Founder of Milk Bottle Labs:
In terms of email marketing, we set up the welcome series for most customers. A 5 euro discount off your first order has been very successful for the majority of our clients where the average order value is over a 100 euros.
Because of GDPR, people trust email lists and are willing to submit their email address in return for that discount. In Ireland and the UK, that really equates to free shipping, so people are getting free shipping on their order even if they don’t pass the free shipping threshold. So, everybody wins.
Consistency is key. Email at certain times during the day and the week and do it consistently. Randomly emailing people when you are put under pressure, because your sales are down, is not the way to do it.
It’s the same for AdWords spending. Keep your AdWords spend consistent. There is no problem at taking advantage of market changes, for example during COVID, the costs reduced, but at the same time, be consistent.
Startup Slang

Damiano Ravintheeran, CEO & Founder of Startup Slang:
We’ve noticed that the transactional email that Shopify sends out with the highest open rate is the thank you email. So that’s a great way for us to advertise.
A normal transactional email has around a 20% open rate, if you’re lucky. But the thank you email has 80-90%. So it just makes sense to add extra marketing material to that in order to bring out conversions and have multiple orders being done by the people who already trust your brand.
It always comes down to content and targeting. As long as your content is really speaking to your target audience, and that involves really understanding who your ideal buyer is and what their behaviour is when they are interacting with your brand. Through that, you can nurture and control conversion rates if you keep working on the messaging.
This article originally appeared in the Recart blog and has been published here with permission.