A high CTR is a good indication that users find your ads or emails helpful and relevant. You can use CTR to gauge which ads and keywords are successful for you and which need to be improved. Here are 5 ways to increase your click through rate right now.

Whether you’re concerned about click through rates on your paid online advertising or your email open rates, some of the strategies to improve these situations are similar. Click through rates measure often people who see your advertisement click on it. Click through rate on an advertisement is calculated by the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown: clicks ÷ impressions = CTR. For example, if you had 5 clicks and 1000 impressions, then your CTR would be 0.5%. Click through rates can also measure how many people open an email. This click-through rate is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view the email.

Ensure consistent branding.

You don’t want people seeing a totally different color scheme in your emails than they do on your website. Customize all of your branding channels so they are the same, to build trust.

Put a special offer in your headline.

If you’re offering a 30% off sale, put that right up front. Don’t make people click through and read several lines of text to get to the real deal.

Use mobile optimization.

The important parts of your email should look good no matter what device your customers are reading it on.

Use images.

It’s been shown through all kinds of studies of emails, advertisements and social media performance that content with images is shared more frequently and in general interacted with more frequently than content without images.

Use buttons rather than links.

Humans want to click on buttons. When you’re planning out your calls to action, use visible, large, easy to click on buttons rather than links to encourage your customers to take the desired action.

When trying these strategies to increase your click through rate, keep in mind that CTRs vary widely. It can be hard to pin down a good average but once you are paying attention to your numbers you’ll be able to see which ones are poor and which are better. You may also want to see how your click through rate changes if you increase or decrease the frequency of your emails or put in a different keyword in your ads. This kind of testing is the basis of any technique to increase your click through rate.