Increasing email marketing conversion rates is not a walk in the park but is as important as any marketing strategy you may have created. You may have gotten your email marketing right to an extent and perfected your marketing campaign. However, if you don’t have certain metrics in place to measure your progress, you might just be wasting your time. One of these metrics is the conversion rates that every business’ success depends on.
How to Calculate Conversion Rates
To calculate your conversion rates, simply take the total number of conversions and divide it by the total number of leads. You can do this for every campaign or landing page for a particular period.
For example, if you send a newsletter and intend to calculate conversions based on the number of clicks to your website. If the newsletter has 1000 opens and 60 people clicked on the link, your conversion rate would be 60/1000, which would be 6%. According to WordStream, a good conversion rate is somewhere around 2% to 5%. So, with a 6% conversion rate, you are right on track and can start working on how to increase it.
One of the major goals for every business owner is to increase conversion rates, as marketing doesn’t stop at acquiring leads only. You need to convert these leads into something more profitable for the business.
In an earlier article, we shared principles of a high-performing email marketing campaign where we highlighted Design, Personalization, and Visuals, among other things. In this article, we discuss other effective ways to get familiar with, to increase email marketing conversion rates in the long run.
1. Optimize Your Mobile Experience
Increasing mobile experience can completely change the game in your marketing efforts. About 66% of emails are read on mobile devices, so you can imagine how much you would be losing if your emails are not optimized for mobile devices. Some key things to consider to ensure your emails are mobile-optimized include:
- Avoid long subject lines
- Give breathing room and enough white spaces while writing, to improve easy reading
- Keep CTAs front and center; use buttons instead links
- Make your copy concise
- Use small-size images without compromising on quality, for faster load time
- Use a clear font type and size that can be easily read on a mobile phone without zooming in
- Use a responsive template
2. Segment Your Email List
Email segmentation is one of the best ways to stand out from the crowd today. Nearly nine out of every ten marketers use email marketing to distribute content organically and billions of emails are sent daily. With these numbers, you can stand out by segmenting your email list.
Segmentation allows you to divide your email list into different sections and group your subscribers based on their characteristics and interests in your brand. This helps you meet them where they are in the customer’s journey. No one wants to constantly get emails that are irrelevant to them but if the emails pertain to their demographic and interest, they are more likely to interact and take action.
Key characteristics to use while segmenting include:
- Demographics
- Purchase history
- Browsing activity
- Content interest
- Level of engagement with previous emails
- Stage of the sales funnel
By choosing a particular segment to email, you can boost your conversion rates. For example, provide discounts to people who have never purchased from your site but subscribed to your newsletter. Email segmentation is one of the best ways to build a credible email list in the long run.
3. Tell a Story
Emails can sometimes get boring, which is why you should take them up a notch. Telling a story is one of the best ways to draw in engagement and research has shown that storytelling can increase conversions by a whopping 30%. Storytelling not only helps you connect with your reader but also ensures they remember what they read, which can have a lasting effect on how they feel about your brand. It builds an emotional connection and is more persuasive than facts and figures.
Research by Headstream further emphasizes the persuasive power of storytelling. This study found that “if people love a brand story, 55% are more likely to buy the product in the future, 44% will share the story, and 15% will buy the product immediately.”
Now will be a good time if you haven’t incorporated storytelling into your email marketing strategy.
4. Set up Automated Drip Campaigns
The image above is an example of what a drip campaign looks like. By setting up an automated drip campaign, you can deliver a set of emails at intervals to your audience at a given time. This helps you stay top of mind and considering that the emails often follow a sequence, your readers will likely look forward to the next. If they don’t decide on the first or second email, they might decide by the 7th email. Drip campaigns have been found to result in a 119% increase in click-through rates over regular campaigns.
Automated drip campaigns also help you save time and if you use an email marketing service provider like MailDrip, you can easily set up a drip campaign with little effort. MailDrip has templates readily available to make the process easier; all you have to do is enter the content where necessary and measure the results.
5. Use Strong CTAs
According to HubSpot, personalized CTAs convert 202% better than default messaging. Rather than the generic call-to-action like “learn more” or “subscribe”, you can get more creative and use strong CTAs. Use a language that specifies that there’s an offer to look forward to by clicking on the button or link. For example, “download now”, “get free template”, “50% discount code”, etc.
Increase Your Email Marketing Conversion Rates
To top up everything that has been highlighted in this article, you need to choose your email marketing service provider carefully.
We have shared earlier the key features to consider when choosing an email marketing tool, some of which include automation, email list segmentation, and email analytics. You need to be able to measure the right metrics to know what’s working and what’s not. Important metrics include open rate and click-through rate, which you will need to calculate your conversion rate.
Before you get started with these tips here, ensure you have a working marketing strategy. If you don’t, we have a free template that can guide your business in the long run. You just need to fill out the form below and get it in your email immediately.
