Email marketing is considered the peak of all marketing strategies out there, with a higher ROI than any other channel for digital marketing. This spikes the interest of many businesses and marketers that find themselves wondering why they see good open rates but are not generating many leads. This is because return only occurs if your email marketing campaign can persuade recipients to finish your goal action.

Briefly, a good open rate is not enough for your email campaign, and email conversion rate is just as important as a metric to track. See more below.

What is email marketing conversion rate?

By email marketing conversion rate, we mean the percentage of subscribers who achieve the desired action after going through your email. This is an important feature for most advertisers. It shows how efficient your email marketing strategy is and determines your return on investment.

Each marketing email you wish to send out must have a specific goal you would like to achieve. This could be to convince people to visit your website, sign up for a free trial, or sell something. Your email should be simple, easy to go through, and straight to the point to catch your audience’s attention and guide them to your website. This could be through a compelling call to action (CTA).

Usually, the conversion goal is related to purchase. That’s why it’s important to automatically relate the success of email marketing to a hard number.

Sales are not always the intention of every email, yet you will always have conversions and goals to measure. It’s best to keep in mind that every email you send out should have a direct delivery of values to your subscribers. Today’s consumer-driven marketplace does not allow creating an overly sales-oriented email to reach successful conversion rates. You should, instead, pay more mind to the value your product is delivering to your clients and persuade them to purchase that way.

How to calculate your email marketing conversion rate

Calculating your email marketing conversion rate can be done using this simple formula:

Email Marketing Conversion Rate = Number of Conversions / Number of Delivered Emails × 100

By dividing the number of people who achieved your goal action (for instance, purchases) by the total number of deliveries, then multiplying that number by one hundred, you’ll end up with your email marketing conversion rate.

Make sure to use the right number for delivered emails as they are minus those that bounced.

For instance, if out of 15 emails, five bounced, the total number of delivered emails is 10. Furthermore, if out of the ten emails, two receivers have completed the purpose you have set for the marketing campaign, it means the conversion number is 2. This leaves us with an email marketing conversion rate of 20%.

Is email marketing conversion rate important?

It’s important to be familiar with your email marketing conversion rate and the formula to calculate it. It will help you determine your email marketing ROI. Simply put, it’s the answer to whether your email campaign was successful or not.

What is a good email marketing conversion rate?

There is no one answer to that question. The only way to determine the success or failure of a campaign is by comparing it yourself and yourself only.

There is a saying that goes, “The only one you should compete with is yourself.”

Taking a close look at your own data is the only way in which you can tell the flaws in your campaign. Taking notice of where you’re falling short will definitely help you achieve good email marketing conversion rates. You should work on boosting your conversion rates with different optimisation techniques.

If you do want to compare your rates to others, you will find a below-average conversion rate for email campaigns. However, these statistics do not really take into consideration many details that play a major role in determining the result. So, a good conversion rate has to be your best conversion rate.

The average email marketing campaigns conversion rates

Average email conversion rates may differ depending on various factors, like company size, industry, email type, geographical location, and others.

GetResponse has collected a list of industry-based average conversion rates.

It shows that sports and activities, publishing, and legal services hold the place for the highest average email marketing conversion rates. On the other hand, automotive, financial services, and retail hold place for the lowest rates. Though always remember that other factors play a major role in this. That is why these comparisons are not the most accurate. These factors vary from the type of email sent to the company’s precise conversion goal.

Also, abandoned cart emails and order follow-up emails have higher average conversion rates compared to newsletter emails that have low rates.

6 tips to accomplish great email marketing conversion rates

A catchy email subject line

You won’t get positive results if you don’t have a catchy subject line. Because if people don’t open your email, they won’t be able to see your message and explore what is within. It’s best to keep it short and descriptive as they often do well. The following examples are some of the best and most successful subject lines formulas:

• Asking questions that will get the recipient curious and interested
• Playing on the fear of missing out by creating urgency
• Including prices, statistics, discounts, etc
• Personalising based on the recipient’s liking and information

Subject lines are only the tip of the iceberg for getting a good email conversion rate. Using personalisation within the email (addressing the recipient) can also be useful. In some instances, it’s a necessity, as it’s important to not neglect details. All of that falls within the realm of good email marketing copywriting.

Group your email list along with the appropriate persona

Putting your recipients into groups based on purchase history, demographics, browsing activities, psychographics, etc., helps you tailor your emails to a specific audience. This gives your email lists more quality and relevance that will most definitely influence both your conversion rates and open rates. Both relevance and segmentation can help you keep your email subscribers engaged over the long term.

Rely on visuals

Visuals can be a vital part of a marketing campaign. People like visuals and they respond very well to them. Try including emojis, stock photos, illustrations, GIFs, and more. If you can’t afford to create original ones, you can always get them for free from online image banks.

There are also free tools out there that can help you to create stunning graphics, Canva is one of them.

Match your content with your recipients’ stage in the funnel

Many organisations are firm believers that email personalisation boosts email marketing performance. Segmentation makes it easier for you to send out content that matches your recipients’ specific customer journey stage, which increases the chances of having them read through and convert.

First

Addressing the customer journey makes it possible for you to send campaigns to your clients based on pre-existing triggers. Some are: 

• Previous conversions and purchases
• The time since the subscription
• Order value on average
• Previous click-through and open rates

Next

The next step is to select the appropriate type of email to send, including:

• Abandonment cart emails: after a customer leaves the cart without making any purchase
• Welcome emails: when a new customer signs up for the list
• Re-engagement emails: in cases where the customer doesn’t visit back in a while
• Post-purchase emails: after purchases are complete

Create a sense of urgency

One of the oldest tricks in the book. Creating a sense of urgency can help you convert more since it encourages readers to take action quickly. This is especially effective if you are offering a particular deal for a limited time.

You can include a countdown clock in your emails to further emphasise the urgency. You can also try to create a sense of scarcity. The traditional way of doing this is offering a discount code that is only usable by the first 100 customers, for example.

Don’t forget that your email should include messages like “Hurry, ends Sunday” or “Online only” to further help.

Make your emails personal

If you happen to be collecting customer data (you should), use it to your advantage. The most obvious use of data is the creation of more “personal” and relevant emails. Targeting your audience members should happen based on their location, demographics, interests, their current status (prospect or customer) and more.

Not to overcomplicate things, personalisation can just be the inclusion of someone’s name in the email. This will make people feel more connected to your business, making them more likely to respond.

We can boost your conversion rates

If you feel like you’ve done everything you can and your emails aren’t generating as many leads and conversions as they should, book a discovery call with us. One of our UK email marketing experts will get in touch shortly to show you how our agency can help with that.

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Email Marketing Conversion Rates – FAQs