Email Marketing: 5 Tips To Improve Conversion Rates

What is the point of sending hundreds of marketing emails to your target audience, but they never open it? It’s a waste of money, time and effort. Email is a very powerful marketing tool if you know how to do it right. Let’s learn 5 tips on how to improve email conversion rates. 

Firstly, let’s talk about what is a good conversion rate.

The conversion rate of an email indicates what percentage of your audience opens the emails you send them. According to the latest analytics from Mailchimp, the average email open rate for all industries is 21.33%. In more details:

• Government-related emails: 28.77% open rate
• Emails sent by hobbies entities: 27.74% open rate.
• Emails about religion: 27.62% open rate.

 To maximize the open rate, below are things you should keep in mind before sending out emails to your subscribers.

1. Segment your receiver

Segmentation is the process of dividing your customer base into several groups regarding their certain traits or criteria. This will help you personalize your email to a suitable audience, and thus improve the efficiency of email marketing with more relevant content.

There are some ways you can segment your list:

• Behavior-specific segmentation: Customers are divided based on their actions when they interact with your brand. For example, the time they spend on one page, number of pages they visit, number of items they put into cart, when they abandon cart, when they are inactive with the brand for a while, etc.
• Location-specific segmentation: Targeting only local audiences is better for conversion of local events.
• Content-specific segmentation: Based on customer age, interests, hobbies and traits to build suitable content. For instance: B2B and B2C require different marketing approaches, the age gap between Gen Z vs Gen X audience also affects marketing message.

Targeting the right audience with the right content not only saves you time but also improves the click-through rate and minimizes unsubscription.

2. Don’t spam

We all know that how easy emails can be filtered as “Spam” and go directly to your customer’s junk folder without anyone realizing it. Thus, it’s crucial to avoid all spam-identity scheme as much as you can:

• Have a suitable number of links in your email. Owning an excessive amount of outbound links in your email content is one of the biggest red flags. Try to include only essential links such as call-to-actions, websites and social media.
• Don’t include too many images, or your email will take forever to fully load and increase the chances of getting caught by spam filters.
• Include an unsubscribe link. Without opt-out options in marketing emails, you will be violating the specific laws set in place to safeguard customers. Don’t forget to mention your physical address if possible, to increase the level of trust and make it through the spam filters.

3. It’s all about the subject line

A subject line might be the first thing that your subscribers read, and an excellent subject line instantly grabs the recipients’ attention which encourages them to open the email instead of moving it into the trash bin.

Did you know that 69% of people will mark an email as spam before they open it, just because of the subject line (Convince and Convert)? Here is some tips to nail your subject line:

• Keep it short and sweet.
• Use a familiar sender name.
• Avoid the ‘no-reply sender name.
• Use personalization tokens.
• Segment your lists.
• Don’t make false promises.
• Do tell them what’s inside.
• Timing is essential.
• Use concise language.
• Start with action-oriented verbs.
• Make people feel special.
• Create a sense of importance.
• Use numbers.

Things may never get right the first time and it’s essential to test different versions of email subject lines to optimize performance. And remember to avoid click-baiting and providing false information or your email may land in the spam section.

4. Don’t forget a call-to-action

Adding an eye-catching Call-to-Action is a simple yet effective way to improve an email’s click-through rate. A call-to-action should be short (two or three words) and should include a sense of urgency to attract attention such as: Shop Today, Register Now. Don’t forget to keep your CTA large and have bright colors to make sure it stands out.

According to an eye-tracking study by Nielsen, the dominant eye movement of users reading web pages looked very much like an F and the least prominent part of your email is the right side. You also want to make sure that CTA follows a natural progression of the email contents, meaning your subscribers don’t have to scroll all the way up to click on a button.

5. Be mobile-friendly 

“Going mobile” is no longer an option, it’s a must for email marketing – especially when nearly 68% of email campaigns being opened on a mobile device. MailChimp measured a 15% increase in CTR among mobile users when using responsive design, meaning recipients don’t have to zoom in and zoom out in order to view full contents.

Mobile optimization ensures good user experiences on small screens and here is how to do that:

• Short subject line (maximum 30 characters) and pre-header text (maximum 50 characters)
• Consider connectivity of various mobiles and try to avoid using large images and heavy effects.
• Push font size bigger and Use a single column layout.

Image source: Shutterstock (578636851)