Don’t Make The Dumb Mistake I Just Made…
By Anna Johnson on July 25th, 2008I just made an unbelievably dumb mistake. Read carefully, because I don’t want you making the same blunder!
Basically, I decided to run an ad in a popular ezine. I saw the ad before it ran and was happy with how it looked and read.
But when I saw the ad in my email client I realized I had overlooked a CRITICAL detail. The link to my landing page, i.e. the call to action that people were supposed to click in order to read about, and take up, my offer was NOT VISIBLE.
After my initial shock at how the publisher could allow my ad to run without the call to action, I realized that I had not “loaded images” in the email. Sure enough, when I clicked on the “load images” button in my email client the link to my offer – which was in the form of an image – appeared.
Remember the article published in this very newsletter about how more and more email clients are NOT loading images by default, and how most subscribers tend not to load images? (See Why Your Open Rate Is Shrinking (It’s Not What You Think))
Well, if only about 20 percent of subscribers tend to load images, then only 20 percent would have seen the link to my landing page. So although I paid to advertise to a list of many thousands, at best only a fifth of that list would have seen the call to action image. And, as is typical, only a fraction of that that 20 percent would have chosen to click on the image.
Bottom line: I probably spent about 5 times more than I should have spent on that ad (based on missing out on 80 percent of prospects).
Don’t make the same mistake! Make sure that if you run an ad in an email – whether it’s a solo email, feature ad, classified ad or anything similar – the link to your landing page is in the form of a TEXT link, NOT an image.
