Deliverability

How to Improve Click-Through Rates in Email Marketing

Open rates flatter your ego. Click-through rates pay your bills. A reader who clicks is a reader who's headed to your book page, your preorder link, or your Patreon — and they're the only ones the algorithms at Amazon, Kobo, and your storefront actually care about.

This guide is for authors and small marketers who want to move their CTR from "average" (around 2–3%) to "great" (6–10%+). No vague advice. Specific levers, in roughly the order they matter.

First, know what "good" looks like

Mailchimp's 2024 benchmarks put the all-industry average click-through rate around 2.6%. For author and publishing lists I've seen, the realistic targets are:

2–3% — you have a list but you're not doing much right yet.
4–6% — solid. You're segmenting and writing decent subject lines.
7–10%+ — your list is engaged, your CTAs are clear, and your content matches what subscribers asked for.

If you're under 2%, fix list hygiene before tactics. The rest of this article assumes you have a clean list of people who actually opted in. If you don't, start with How to Make an Email List.

1. Treat clicks as a downstream metric of relevance

The single biggest CTR lever is sending the right email to the right person. A romance reader who gets a sci-fi launch announcement won't click — even if your CTA is gorgeous.

Segment by what people signed up for. At minimum:

Series or pen-name — readers of your urban fantasy probably don't want your literary fiction.
Engagement — anyone who hasn't opened in 90 days drags down both deliverability and CTR. Move them to a re-engagement track or sunset them.
Source — readers from a free-book funnel behave differently from readers who bought.

Most ESPs (including AuthorMailingLists.com, ConvertKit, MailerLite) let you tag at signup and segment at send. Use it.

2. One email, one decision

The more links you add, the lower your click rate on any individual link, and often the lower your overall CTR too. Decision fatigue is real.

For launch and promo emails, pick one primary action. Buy the book. Preorder. Read the chapter. Repeat that same link 2–3 times in the email — once near the top, once mid-body as a button, once at the bottom. Don't sprinkle in social links and a P.S. about your blog and a footer link to your other series. Those compete with the one thing you actually want.

For newsletters, three CTAs is the practical ceiling. Put the most important one first.

3. Get the CTA above the fold

Mobile clients show roughly the first 300–400 pixels before scroll. If your big "Read the first chapter" button isn't in that space, half your readers will never see it.

Rule of thumb: a clear link or button should appear within the first three lines of your email. You can build context after — most readers click on intent, not on persuasion.

4. Buttons beat naked URLs, but text links beat both for trust

The tradeoff:

Buttons — higher CTR for transactional intent (Buy, Preorder, Download). Visually unmissable.
Inline text links — feel more personal, less marketed. Fiction readers click these more often when the email is conversational.

The best-performing author emails I've seen use both: a buttoned CTA mid-email plus 1–2 inline links woven into the prose ("…you can grab it here"). Test the mix.

5. Write subject lines that promise the click

Your subject line earns the open. But it also frames what the reader expects to do once inside. "Quick update" gets opened and ignored. "Chapter 1 of Bone Harvest is live" tells the reader there's a link coming and primes them to look for it.

A/B test subject lines on every campaign with more than ~1,000 recipients. Even a 5% lift in opens compounds straight into clicks. Most platforms (ours included) split-test automatically on a sample, then send the winner to the rest.

6. Shorten the email

If you're writing 800-word newsletters and getting low CTR, cut to 250. Then 150. The shorter the email, the higher the % who reach your CTA.

This runs counter to advice from content marketers — but those marketers are usually monetizing on-page ads, not driving clicks off the email. For author emails where the goal is "go buy/read this thing," shorter almost always wins.

7. Personalize beyond the first name

"Hey {{first_name}}" is table stakes and barely moves CTR anymore. What does move it:

Reference the last book they downloaded or bought.
Reference the series they followed in.
Send a different version to engaged vs. lapsed subscribers — the engaged ones get the full pitch, the lapsed ones get a re-introduction.

If your platform supports book catalog data — AuthorMailingLists.com, for example, ties characters and series to your subscribers so the AI-drafted Always-On newsletter pulls from the right shelf — use it. Generic blasts plateau around 3% CTR for a reason.

8. Send when your readers actually read

There's no universal best time. There's your best time, and you find it by looking at your own click data over 6–8 sends.

That said, two patterns hold for most author lists:

Tuesday–Thursday mornings (7–10am local) outperform Mondays and Fridays.
Sunday evenings are surprisingly strong for fiction — readers planning their week's downtime.

If your platform supports send-time optimization per subscriber, turn it on. The lift is usually 5–15% on clicks.

9. Make the link itself look clickable

Small things that compound:

Use descriptive anchor text ("start reading Chapter 1") instead of "click here."
Color buttons in a high-contrast accent — not the same gray as your nav.
Don't underline non-link text. It trains readers to ignore real underlines.
Make buttons at least 44px tall — Apple's tap-target minimum.

10. Re-send to non-openers (carefully)

Resending the same campaign 3–4 days later with a new subject line to people who didn't open the first one typically recovers 20–30% of the missed audience. Their clicks count toward your overall CTR.

Caveat: don't do this on every campaign or you'll train people to delete you. Save it for launches and big promos.

11. Prune ruthlessly

A 5,000-subscriber list where 4,000 haven't opened in six months has worse CTR — and worse deliverability — than a 1,000-subscriber list of active readers. Once a quarter, archive subscribers with zero opens in 90+ days. Your CTR will jump immediately, and so will inbox placement.

If you're worried about list size for ego reasons, remember: Amazon doesn't see your list count. Amazon sees your launch sales.

A note on what not to optimize

Some things sound clickable but barely move the needle:

Emoji in subject lines (small lift on opens, near-zero on CTR for fiction).
AMP for email (most clients still don't render it).
Endless A/B tests on button color (real lift is usually under 0.3%).

Spend your time on segmentation, list hygiene, and CTA clarity. That's where the actual gains live.

Where to go next

If your list is too small for these tactics to matter much yet, focus on growth first: How to Grow Your Email List covers the playbooks that actually work for authors. If you're starting from zero, How to Get an Email List for Marketing lays out the legitimate options (and the ones to avoid).

Frequently asked

How do I increase click rate in email marketing without losing subscribers?

Segment first, then sharpen your CTA. The biggest cause of low click rates is irrelevance — sending the same email to everyone. Tag subscribers at signup by series, genre, or interest, then send tighter, shorter emails with one clear action. You'll often see CTR double while unsubscribe rates drop, because readers are getting fewer but more relevant messages. The subscribers you do lose are usually the ones who never engaged anyway — and pruning them lifts both CTR and deliverability.

How do I increase click-through rate email campaigns are getting if my open rate is already good?

If opens are healthy (30%+) but clicks lag below 3%, the gap is usually inside the email, not the subject line. Three common fixes: move your primary CTA into the first 300 pixels so mobile readers see it without scrolling; cut the email by 40–60% so the link gets more weight; and make sure your subject line previews the action inside ("Chapter 1 is live" not "Quick update"). Subject-action mismatch is the silent killer of CTR even on well-opened emails.

How do I increase email click-through rate on a small list?

Small lists actually have the advantage — you can be more personal and specific than a brand sending to 100,000 people. Write like you're emailing one reader. Reference the book they downloaded or the series they signed up for. Use plain-text-style emails instead of heavy HTML templates; they look like real correspondence and consistently outperform branded designs on author lists. A 500-person list at 12% CTR beats a 5,000-person list at 1.5% almost every time.

What is a good click-through rate for author email lists?

Across author and publishing lists, 2–3% is roughly average, 4–6% is solid, and 7–10%+ indicates a genuinely engaged audience. Fiction lists tend to score higher than nonfiction because readers signed up for a specific reading experience and click reliably on chapter previews and launches. Don't compare your numbers to ecommerce or B2B benchmarks — they're optimizing different behaviors. Compare your campaign CTR to your own previous sends and look for trend, not absolute number.

Should I A/B test every email to improve click-through rate?

Test where the lift is real: subject lines and the primary CTA. Skip tests on button color, font, and emoji — the swings are usually under 0.3% and noise will eat your sample. You also need at least ~1,000 recipients per variant for results to be meaningful; below that, run the same test across 3–4 sends and look at the pattern. Most ESPs, including AuthorMailingLists.com, will auto-test subject lines on a sample and roll out the winner.

Does sending more emails hurt or help click-through rate?

It depends on relevance. Sending weekly to a list that signed up for monthly will tank both CTR and deliverability. But under-sending hurts too — readers forget who you are, mark you as spam, and clicks collapse. The sustainable cadence for most author lists is one short email per week (a brief update, a recommendation, or a chapter snippet) plus launch announcements. Consistency matters more than frequency: pick a rhythm and hold it for at least 12 weeks before judging the impact on clicks.