If you don’t consider the Email Conversion Rate in your marketing analysis, you are leaving an essential aspect of your campaigns behind. You are missing the most precious data of your marketing projects.
Even though you see high or satisfactory Open Rates, they are unable to show if you are converting visitors into paying customers.
In this sense, it’s impossible to measure the Return on Investment (ROI), once it only happens if your subscribers go through all the phases of the sales funnel, in which the conversion step is the finish line.
In other words, when subscribers are actually opening your messages but aren’t taking the desired action, the conversion doesn’t happen, hence, no Return on Investment isn’t made.
Looking at conversions is deeply important to measure the success of your marketing campaigns. That’s why you should know everything that there is about Email Conversion Rate, in this brief article will help you with it. This content will teach you how to:
- calculate the Email Conversion Rate;
- analyze the Email Conversion Rate;
- compare it in relation to the ROI;
- improve your performance at converting.
By the end of this article, you will be able to convert more and boost your ROI. Enjoy it!
- What is the Email Conversation Rate?
- How can you determine Email Conversion strategies?
- Calculating the Email Conversion Rate
- What is a good Email Conversation Rate for email marketing?
- How can you improve your Email Conversion Rate?
What is the Email Conversion Rate?
By definition, the Email Conversion Rate is the percentage of subscribers that were convinced to complete the desired action. In light of this fact, this marketing metric can show how powerful your messages are.
Your marketing campaigns usually have two main objectives:
- Lead-generation objectives: turning visitors into subscribers.
- Purchase-related objectives: turning subscribers into active customers.
The Email Conversion Rate reveals how successful your marketing campaigns were, in both aspects. Keep reading to figure out what you can do to make sure the conversion happens.
How can you determine Email Conversion strategies?
The word “conversion” has several meanings in the marketing dictionary. However, they all have one detail in common: make the lead take the desired action.
This way, how are you supposed to determine the adequate email conversion strategy? Let’s imagine two possible scenarios and verify what is the best action to be taken in order to achieve the desired result.
Our first scenario is related to lead-generation goals. To turn visitors into subscribers, making your Email Conversion Rate increase, you can try:
- offering a free template or e-book, encouraging visitors to complete their registration;
- using social media to attract people to your landing pages and homepage;
- keeping your blog always updated and producing trendy content;
- writing easy-to-read and visually appealing emails;
- paying attention to CTA commands (clear, simple, and easy to notice);
- subject lines are just as important as CTAs buttons;
- referral programs are an interesting strategy to find potentially new leads.
These strategies are proven to be functional and effective when you want to increase the volume of conversions and make your email lists grow qualitatively.
On the other hand, if you aim at improving your Email Conversion Rate by transforming subscribers into active customers, you can explore the following strategies:
- giving special discounts to new customers;
- offering incentives to make customers return to their abandoned carts;
- elaborating CTAs that are rewarding or give the idea of problem-solving;
- offering exclusive products or deals to the most loyal customers;
- exploring the sense of urgency in your campaigns;
- FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) feelings are also great at converting sales.
All these different paths take your company to the same destination: more conversions and sales.
Now that you are well acquainted with strategies that can boost your Email Conversion Rate, it’s time to learn how to calculate it.
How to calculate the Email Conversion Rate?
If you want to know your company’s Email Conversion Rate, you should pay attention to the following conversion rate formula:
| Email Conversion Rate = (Number of people who have performed the desired action / Number of successfully delivered emails) * 100 |
By dividing the number of individuals who have taken the desired action (such as signups, purchases, answering a survey and so on) by the number of successful deliveries, and, then, multiplying the result by 100, you can find out the Email Conversion Rate for an email marketing campaign.
Email Conversion Rate and ROI
Your ability to convert is strongly linked to the ROI of your company. If your Email Conversion Rate drops, so will your ROI. It basically means that every conversion has become more expensive.
Understanding the relationship between the Email Conversion Rate and ROI is essential to organizing and conducting a successful email marketing campaign.
Let’s suppose you spend US$ 2.000,00 on a piece of content, which was delivered to 20.000 subscribers. This content generated 500 clicks. It means your current Email Conversion Rate is around 2,5% and that your company US$ 4,00 for each conversion.
However, in the following month, you decided to personalize this campaign. The new improved campaign generated 800 clicks, making your Email Conversion Rate increase to 4%. Every conversion cost US$ 2,50.
You can realize that the better your email campaigns, the less you spend to generate conversions. Focus on the quality of your campaigns to improve the Email Conversion Rate, and, consequently, your company’s ROI.
What is a good Email Conversion Rate for email marketing?
There is no right answer to this question. Your Email Conversion Rate will depend on the current reality of your company and the established goals for specific email marketing campaigns.
Nevertheless, one thing is certain, the Email Conversion Rate must be in constant improvement. Every current rate should be better than the previous one. Additionally, the Email Conversion Rate depends on many factors, such as:
- the kind of industry you are in;
- its location;
- the type of email;
- the size of your company;
- and so on.
However, it’s nice to have some kind of benchmark to help you have a bigger picture of the situation of your company.
According to data collected by GetResponse, legal services (14,55%), publishing (13,55%), and sports & activities (11,40%) have the best Email Conversion Rates.
On the other hand, retail (4,52%), financial services (5,63%), and automotive (5,95%) usually struggle to achieve a satisfactory Email Conversion Rate, considering that 7% is the average rate among several industries.
Always consider the kind of industry and type of email before everything else. The percentage of 6% or 7% is a reasonable and achievable starting point.
How to improve your Email Conversion Rate?
Improving your Email Conversion Rate is a never-ending task. When you work to improve this marketing KPI, you are also improving key elements that sustain your business. We can mention some quick examples, such as:
- the quality of email lists;
- overall content;
- relationship with customers;
- the effectiveness of platforms;
- the layout and design of landing pages.
Keep reading to get familiar with some strategies to improve your Email Conversion Rate.
Have a strict policy of Email List Management
To manage an email list, you will need so much more than gathering random emails from people all over the internet.
Sending emails without any criteria will destroy your email deliverability and Sender Score, making your domain an easy target for spam filters, and public blocklists.
As a result, your Email Bounce Rate will increase, while your positive results go in the opposite direction.
There is so much more to it. Email List Management is vital and determinant to planning and conducting a successful email marketing campaign.
We are talking about grouping your subscribers into different segments. The criteria you use to organize these groups are up to you, but companies usually organize their lists by:
- location;
- purchase history;
- stage on the sales funnel;
- browsing history;
- customer time;
- other similar aspects.
List segmentation is essential to ensure that the right email will be delivered to the right audiences, protecting your engagement levels and Email Conversion Rate as well.
Besides, it also avoids the annoyance and frustration of delivering emails to people who don’t relate to them. This will keep your company’s email address from receiving spam complaints and/or unsubscribe requests.
Conduct many A/B Tests
Testing is the most efficient way to be in constant improvement. When you experiment, you can separate the good strategies from the bad ones.
This way, you are able to find the strengths and weaknesses in email marketing campaigns and fix the most urgent issues, protecting your Email Conversion Rate. When you are conducting A/B tests, remember to focus on this checklist:
- Establishing only one behavior or hypothesis to be tested.
- Find out the main obstacles between an individual and conversion.
- Come up with possible ways to remove these obstacles.
- Decide which feature you want to A/B test first. Avoid mixed results.
- Decide how long the test is going to take. A month seems like a reasonable time.
- Compare the results of the A/B tests and act.
- Keep an eye on the email marketing metrics and KPIs while testing.
- Make sure the issue was successfully fixed.
- Repeat, repeat, and repeat.
Conducting A/B tests will greatly improve the quality of your marketing campaigns and the Email Conversion Rate. They are going to tell you everything you need to know about the:
- size of the subject lines;
- quality of the CTA buttons;
- your word choices;
- strength of your content;
- so much more.
Put the user experience in the first place
If you are making your visitors upset or getting them annoyed, you won’t have any conversions. Increasing the Email Conversion Rate is all about making the visitors and subscribers happy and pleased.
The funny thing is that you don’t need too much to please your audience. Small initiatives can result in a great number of conversions. Keep reading to check some examples to please your target audience.
- Simple language and the conversational tone will grab the readers’ attention more easily.
- It’s easier to convince someone to take action when we focus on the solutions instead of products.
- Having testimonials and real-life examples of how your company made a difference in somebody or some company’s routine is a great help at convincing.
- Keeping registration forms quick and simple to fill is an interesting initiative to provide a positive experience to visitors. Simple forms will make your Email Conversion Rate increase.
- Eliminating all the distractions on your landing pages will make the visitor focus on the most important information.
- Rewards are powerful at convincing, especially when customers are in the initial steps of the sales funnel.
These approaches are simple to follow, and they have a positive impact on the user experience. When you walk in the users’ shoes, you can easily notice what your audience expects from you, and you can adapt your strategies to fulfill their expectations.
Implement a CRO Strategy
Implementing a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) plan to improve your email marketing campaign is something you should consider doing not only to achieve more conversions but to improve all your platforms and customer experience.
A CRO strategy can be defined as an approach that aims at improving the user experience in your platforms (homepage, landing pages, apps, and emails, for example) to identify the biggest obstacles that users find in their journey to conversion.
When you know your weaknesses, you can act on them through A/B tests and similar strategies. For obvious reasons, a CRO plan will make your Email Conversion Rate rocket.
To implement a CRO strategy, your marketing team should think of a plan based on the following questions:
- What brings people to the company’s communication channels?
- Where do they come from?
- Why do people leave my site without performing any action?
- What are the high-traffic exit pages? When does the visitor give up?
- What kind of content is not generating conversions?
- What are the customers’ hesitations?
- What are the main frustrations?
Identifying the hooks that attract traffic to your company’s channel, as well as spotting the main obstacles, is vital to implementing a CRO strategy. If you want to have a satisfactory Email Conversion Rate, focus on the user experience.
Now that you learn all that you need to know about Email Conversion Rate is time to understand the complex approach of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) to improve your email marketing campaigns and platforms. Enjoy the SafetyMails content that will help it with!
Why is it important to implement an email verification service in your strategy?
When you build an email database, you surely want to have real people connected in your lists.
However, many people give a fake email address or an invalid one. They can simply make silly spelling mistakes during the registration process in your landing page or newsletters, for example.
SafetyMails has an expertise in prevent your whole strategy went to waste because you ended up with several addresses that are not fit to use. In other words, using our email verifier, your collected addresses are real, and can generate engagement.
In case of typos, the service can solicit corrections and reviews, making sure you don’t lose a promising lead. Everything happens in real-time and the email checker api is accurate and fast.
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Choose SafetyMails and see how easy it is to make sure no invalid or harmful addresses get to your subscriber lists!