How can Pharma Marketers Increase Click-through Rates?

Click-through rates (CTR) are often key performance indicators for advertising and email marketing campaigns. After all, getting healthcare professionals (HCPs) and consumers to your landing pages is how you build brand equity, generate leads, and get conversions.

For your digital ad campaigns using Google AdWords or Facebook advertising, a higher CTR leads to a better Quality Score or Relevance Score, which can help you save on cost-per-click rates and lead to more visible ad positioning.

For email marketing, higher rates help inform new campaigns by revealing effective messaging that can be embedded in future subject lines and preview text to improve open rates.

What a Click-through Is and Is Not

When an HCP clicks a link, they seek more knowledge. How they feel about the knowledge they are provided is a different story. So a click-through is an indication of relevance.

However, campaigns that are not targeted to a specific audience or lead to poorly conceived landing pages lose that relevance and see rapidly declining engagement, lower ad placement on search engines, and higher unsubscribe rates. So clicks alone are not good indicators of true campaign success.

Instead, a combination of high CTR with more conversions is a more accurate sign that your campaigns are targeted, effective, and valuable for your audience.

4 Ways to Increase Click-through Rates

Include social sharing options in email messages. Social sharing is yesterday’s word-of-mouth advertising. So include at least one sharing option—preferably multiple options—in your email campaigns. Results show that emails including a single social sharing option generated a 115% higher click-through rate than those that do not. And those with 3 or more social sharing buttons garnered 55% higher rates than those with a single option. If a recipient is not interested in an offer, they may know someone who would be and might be willing to share.

Segment audiences. Some marketers continue to market to their audiences as a single body. Avoid canvassing your contacts with catch-all messaging. Instead, create audience segments along specialty lines or by geography. Research shows that marketers who segment their lists enjoy 18% more transactions, 24% more sales leads, and 24% higher revenue. Segmenting can also help when testing campaign content for higher engagement.

Focus on SEO as well as paid campaigns. While many brands put significant resources into paid search ad campaigns, search engine optimization is an important ally to paid search. It typically costs much less to optimize for organic ranking, which can lower your cost per acquisition over the long run. And with an average CTR of 18.20 percent for position 1 versus 1.04 percent for position 10, you have the opportunity to generate approximately 1,600% more traffic with better content optimization.

Use data and facts to drive engagement. HCPs and formularies are leaning more heavily on objective data and verified claims than ever before. So lead with data points in your ad copy and email subject lines and headings. Then add supporting statements in your ad descriptions and email subheadings and body copy. For ad campaigns, update ads and landing page copy with new favorable data as they become available. This will help strengthen your headlines and provide fresh content for the engines to index.

Many consider CTR a vanity metric. Prevailing wisdom is to focus on conversions and conversion rate. While that focus is warranted, ignoring CTR is like avoiding a knock on the door to your business. You can’t let them inside until you get them to click-through the door they’ll knock on.

To help boost your CTR, consider aligning your brand with Elsevier’s portfolio of digital and print publications by leveraging Elsevier’s credible content or featuring the data from a key trial via a digital reprint. Explore our 2021 rate card here.

Article Written by: Alex Brown