Email marketing generally serves one of two purposes: To build brand recognition and nurture relationships with customers, or to persuade those customers to take a desired action (called a conversion).
An email conversion rate helps measure the success of an email marketing campaign and is one of the most important email analytics to follow.
A higher email conversion rate indicates good engagement, demonstrating that recipients are following through with your desired action. A low rate indicates the opposite, highlighting potential issues with your email marketing campaign or the content of your emails themselves.
Understanding your email conversion rate helps you craft compelling emails that convert recipients into clients, customers, or subscribers.
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What is an email conversion rate?
An email conversion rate is the percentage of email recipients that complete your preferred action. Actions can change depending on the goals of your marketing campaigns, but can include purchasing your product, subscribing to your service, or agreeing to receive ongoing communications from your brand.
Calculating your email conversion rate gives you insight into the success and effectiveness of your marketing campaign.
What is a good email conversion rate?
As with many email marketing concepts, there is no one good conversion rate. A good conversion rate depends on many factors, including your industry, the type of email you sent out, the action you want subscribers to take, the subscriber segments you’re targeting, and your desired benchmark.
Overall, a good email conversion rate is one that improves upon your previous rate or delivers an acceptable ROI.
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How to determine your email conversion rate
To calculate your email conversion rate:
- Determine the number of recipients that took your desired action (conversions).
- Divide that number by the number of successful email deliveries.
- Multiply by 100.
The formula looks like:
Number of conversions / number of successful deliveries * 100 = Email conversion rate
The result is your email conversion rate.
For example, a campaign that secures 100 conversions over 10000 successful deliveries results in a conversion rate of 1%.
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Factors that impact your email conversion rate
As discussed, a number of factors can impact your email conversion rate. Understanding how the following factors affect your email conversion rate can help you optimize and increase it in subsequent marketing campaigns.
Email subject line
An effective email subject line piques a recipient’s interest and entices them to open your email in the first place. Without a clear and engaging subject line, your subscribers might delete your emails without even opening them, causing you to lose out on the opportunity to convert them into customers or clients.
To improve your email conversion rate, write short, clear, and interesting subject lines that give your subscribers a reason to open your email. Tease the content that you’ll include in the email itself and appeal to your subscribers’ needs and preferences.
Email responsiveness
Gone are the days in which users overwhelmingly accessed email on desktop computers. Today, subscribers receive emails on a variety of devices, including desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, cell phones, and other devices.
Unfortunately, your email isn’t guaranteed to display similarly across devices. Emails that lack proper responsiveness can appear clipped, cut off, or otherwise jumbled, giving recipients reason to ignore your carefully crafted content before binning the email all together.
Optimize your email conversion rate by prioritizing the responsiveness of your designs. Ensure that the layout and any images and text respond to various devices. Your email should load quickly, fonts should be readable, images should scale, and the body text should be concise. Finally, your call to action should be functional and properly displayed across devices.
Personalization and segmentation
Optimizing your email conversion rate depends on reaching the right people. Emails that target an overly broad subscriber base can suffer from low conversion rates because too many recipients are uninterested in the message you have to share.
Use personalization and email segmentation techniques to send targeted emails to those subscribers most likely to engage with them. Use data like customer locations or demographics to email subscribers who will find genuine value in your offer and who are more receptive to following through with your desired action.
Similarly, use segmentation to send email based on where recipients are in your sales funnel. For example, an email offering a discount to new customers isn’t beneficial to repeat customers, lowering your email conversion rate.
Offer quality
To optimize your email conversion rate, your offer needs to benefit your target subscriber base in some way. A poor, disappointing, or irrelevant offer won’t generate conversions, negatively impacting your email conversion rate.
Avoid this potential and maximize your ROI by ensuring your offer provides genuine value. Explain why recipients should follow your request to take action. Demonstrate the benefits of becoming a lead or making a purchase by offering a discount, providing a lead magnet, or highlighting the upsides of using your product or service.
Call to action
A good email conversion rate requires an effective and compelling call to action. A bland or uninteresting CTA can dissuade a recipient from taking the last step to converting, whereas a witty, enticing, and powerful CTA contributes to an increased email conversion rate.
Achieve this by ensuring your CTA is short, concise, and relevant. Tie up the contents of your email with a reason for the recipient to take action and convert.
In addition, make sure that your CTA is highly visible and not lost within the design of your email. Design an effective CTA that stands out from the email so that recipients can’t miss it.
Conclusion
Email marketers can use different metrics to determine the success of a marketing campaign. Calculating and understanding these metrics can help you identify flaws in your email marketing strategy, helping you improve your ROI.
Your email conversion rate gives you insight into how many recipients took a desired action, such as purchasing a product, subscribing to a service, or becoming a lead. From there, you can take steps to improve your email designs and layouts, hone your segmentation and personalization efforts, offer better value, or craft more compelling calls to action that increase your email conversion rate and, ultimately, your business revenue and growth.
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