Q: If there are more links in an email, will more people click?

Keeping email copy short can be a daunting task with so many marketing needs coming from various departments. But what happens when you go from a few links in a campaign to a lot of links? It’s a simple question with an intriguing and directly applicable result. Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at 1,200 email campaigns sent by 60 resorts to over 70,000,000 recipients during the last six months. We grouped these messages by how many links each contained and found the average click rate and average clicks per clicker (“total clicks” / “unique clicks”) for each group.

For our sample, more links in an email led to both a higher overall click rate and more total clicks by each person who clicked the email at least once. Click rate jumped from 6.7% for emails with 1-10 links to 8.6% for emails with more than 30 links. Clicks per clicker went from 1.2 to 1.6 across those same groups.

What This Means
More options in an email lead to more clicks, that much seems clear. This increase in links appears to be the proverbial shotgun approach to content: Send enough topics toward your target and you increase the likelihood that at least one will be a hit.

But keep in mind that the number of clicks does not grow as quickly as the number of links. In other words, the more links you have, the fewer you get on any single one.