How to Calculate and Improve Your Email Conversion Rate
To truly harness the potential of email marketing, you need to understand and analyze the impact of your campaigns. Fortunately, there is a tool that you can use to gain valuable insights for email marketing optimization.
Introducing the email conversion rate — a key metric that shows the effectiveness of your digital promotions. This method can determine the influence of your marketing campaigns by showing you how many recipients engage and take the desired action.
In this blog, I’ll outline the significance of an email conversion rate, show you how to calculate it effectively, and improve your email marketing efforts. Let’s get started!
Understanding Your Email Conversion Rate
The email conversion rate measures your campaign’s return on investment (ROI) and validity in achieving specific goals. You can also get better at reaching the right audience and delivering the right message, leading to more sales and profit.
Using these percentages, you can further understand how well your marketing campaigns generate conversions and view other metrics, such as:
- Making a sale
- Filling out a registration form
- Clicking on a link
- Subscribing to a service
- Leaving a review
- Signing up for a trial or demo
- Downloading resources from email
- Providing feedback
- Completing a transaction
What Is a Good Email Conversion Rate?
Generally, a conversion rate ranging from 2% to 5% is often favorable. However, your “ideal” rate may be higher or lower.
Ultimately, the answer can vary based on factors such as:
- Industry
- Business model
- Target Audience
- Marketing Channel
- Seasonality
- Trend
- Offers
- Traffic Source
Steps to Calculate Email Conversion Rate
Remember, if you want a good email campaign and a responsive audience, you need to look at your data closely and identify areas for improvement. This allows you to reorganize your approach and look for the right optimization techniques to use.
Here are important steps that can give you the ability to track and check your conversions:
1. Gather Necessary Data
To get started, you must have two sets of data available:
- Total Emails Sent: Refers to the number of emails delivered to recipients.
- Total Conversions: Shows how many people did what your email marketing campaign wanted them to do.
By gathering data on the total emails sent and conversions, you can have solid figures to elevate future marketing efforts.
2. Use the Email Conversion Rate Formula
Here’s how you can calculate your conversion rate with the formula:
- Determine the time frame for which you want to calculate the conversion rate. The span can be monthly, quarterly, or annually.
- Gather data within the set period about the number of emails sent.
- Identify and count specific actions or conversions you want to measure.
- Calculate the conversion rate using the formula: (Total number of conversions/total number of emails sent) x 100.
- Interpret the calculated email conversion rate. For example, if your total number of sign-up conversions is 200, divided by your total email sent of 10,000, your quotient is 0.02. To convert the value into a percentage, multiply by 100, and you will get an email conversion rate of 2%.
5 Ways to Boost Email Conversion Rate
Want to level up your email campaigns and elevate those conversion rates? Get ready to turn things around!
Here are some excellent ways that will give you the edge you need to maximize your results:
1. Have a Good Subject Line
A good subject line can improve your email marketing’s impact. It’s a great way to capture attention and stimulate engagement, and amazing subject lines can become huge paydays.
Here are some tips on creating a compelling subject line:
- Be concise and clear: Keep your subject line brief, conveying the email’s main message or value proposition.
- Personalize: Make subject lines personal to each person by thinking about what they like, want, or did before. This way, your commercial actions are more interesting and engaging to recipients.
- Avoid spam triggers: Avoid using too many capital letters, punctuation, or tricking language in your emails. These things can make your emails look spam and end up in the spam folder.
- Create curiosity: Highlight the perks your recipients can expect by opening your email, emphasizing what’s in it for them.
2. Segment Your Email List
Email segmentation is the process of categorizing your email recipients into distinct groups based on specific criteria, such as:
- Demographics
- Geographic location
- Psychographics
- Purchase history
- Engagement level
- Survey result
- Amount Spent
- Position in Sales Funnel
- Personal Interests
Segmentation helps you bond with your audience by showing that you know their preferences. By sending messages tailored to their needs and desires, you increase the likelihood of engagement and conversion. You also demonstrate that you — as a brand — care about your subscribers.
This approach also helps you reduce the unsubscribe rate. As you implement segmentation, you can make sure that you only send emails that are relevant to each audience.
Unlike generic emails, personalized emails attract higher open and click-through rates. DMA reports that segmented and targeted emails yield 58% of all earnings.
3. Use Automation and Trigger Emails
Email marketing automation uses tools to send personalized emails based on specific triggers. These triggers are a subset of automated emails that are activated by a specific activity, such as:
- Subscribing
- Abandoning a cart
- Completing purchase
- Milestone
- Order Confirmation
- Birthday
- Re-engagement
Triggered emails significantly boost email conversion rates due to their ability to deliver timely and relevant content. According to Experian, trigger emails have 25% higher open rates and 51% higher click rates than traditional promotional emails.
When triggered emails send the right content at the right time, it creates a feeling of urgency, a proven way to improve your marketing function. Besides, this process saves you time and effort while achieving better results from your email marketing campaigns.
4. Focus on A/B Testing
A/B testing, or split testing, is when marketers compare different versions of a marketing approach, often referred to as variants A and B. This technique is used to figure out which version works better and makes more profit. In this experiment, the target group is divided into subgroups, and each group uses a different version of the campaign. An example would be seeing if using a sales tax calculator to add sales tax would increase or decrease churn.
Below is a guide on how you can use A/B testing:
- Determine your objective.
- Modify your A/B test variants and randomly assign website visitors to variants A and B.
- Run the A/B test for a specific period to gather sufficient data to ensure statistical significance.
- Measure the conversion rate for each variant by tracking the number of visitors who delivered a desired action on the campaign.
- Analyze the results by comparing the conversion rates of variants A and B.
- Whichever variant has the higher conversion rate, implement it as the new default campaign design.
- Consider further modifications and testing if there is no significant difference in both variants.
- Document the test results, insights, and decisions made throughout the testing process for future reference.
- Regularly conduct A/B tests to optimize and improve your email marketing campaign continuously.
5. Use a Responsive Design
When emails look weird or hard to read on different mobile devices, people usually don’t engage with them as much and may unsubscribe. Designing adaptive, responsive campaigns alleviates these issues and reduces these risks.
With a responsive design, emails adjust to the user’s mobile device, providing a seamless and user-friendly experience. This strategy enhances readability, improves navigation, and makes calls-to-action more prominent and clickable.
Below are some guidelines for crafting an effective, responsive design:
- Use a layout that can be adjusted for various screen sizes.
- Enhance font size and line spacing to make the text easier to read on tiny displays.
- Utilize a single-column layout for convenient reading.
- Ensure the size and touch-adaptiveness of the graphics and buttons.
- Test your email on various devices to verify compatibility and responsiveness.
Increase Your Conversion Rate With Us
Calculating email conversion rates is crucial for effective marketing strategies. This approach allows you to foresee engagement levels and make informed decisions.
Book a free strategy session and boost your conversion rate with my team at The Email Marketers. We leverage our expertise to create strong campaigns that captivate and drive action. With a proven history of getting good results, we are dedicated to helping you increase your email conversion rates to maximize returns.