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6 Effective Marketing Strategies to Increase Your Email Conversion Rate
This is a guest post from Alyse Falk.
In a world of continuously changing digital trends, you must provide your recipients with useful and effective email.
After all, email is proven to be one of the most effective methods to drive leads and conversions for B2C companies. That’s why you don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to improve your email marketing strategy.
This means relevant content that appeals to your readers. And if you’re trying to increase your email conversion rate, you’re likely considering several strategies for relevant content that works for you and your subscribers.
But which strategies should you use?
Luckily, we’ve gathered the most powerful email marketing options to help you convert more prospects into paying customers.
Wait, what is the conversion rate and why is it so important?
For many marketers, the email conversion rate remains a bit of a mystery. Let’s cover the basics.
The email conversion rate refers to the percentage of subscribers who either become customers or complete the desired action as a result of your email efforts.
The desired action always depends on your preset goals. That’s why there’s no such thing as a perfect conversion rate, as it differs from industry to industry and from business to business.
However, you can research the average email benchmarks for your industry by reading our benchmarks here.
The first thing you should do is determine your email conversion rate and ensure you’re employing the best strategies to increase it:
1. Use the power of visuals
People are more inclined to process visual information over text, and many of us make sense of our worlds by processing the visual information surrounding us.
Research suggests that the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. For that reason, visuals are central in many marketing campaigns.
What does it have to do with your conversion rate? Studies propose that companies who create their own visual content have 7 times higher conversions than those who don’t. This means that the smart use of visuals in emails has the potential to boost your conversion rate significantly.
Learn to choose images for your emails. Get the guide.
GIFs
In recent years, GIFs have evolved into the whole language that helps us express emotions. Moreover, GIFs have become a significant part of global digital culture. Millions of online users send, receive, and relate to GIFs.
As a marketer, you want to seize the opportunity and capitalize on the popularity of GIFs to get more email conversions.
Use GIFs to showcase or advertise your products. They’re great for grabbing attention and keeping your recipients glued to the screen. Here’s how Amazon handled embedding GIFs into their promotional series.
Source: Gyazo
Videos
Many marketers make a huge mistake when they overlook the effectiveness of video marketing. Did you know that simply adding the word “video” into your subject line can increase your click-through rate by 65%? If you’re still not convinced, check out this list of statistics to get an idea of how it can help your open rates and conversions.
Share product overviews, explainer videos, testimonials, and tutorials via email. For example, below a 30 second Campaign Monitor testimonial, which we could easily incorporate into an email about our customers.
Product images
Product images are another highly effective type of visuals you should include in your emails. However, since so many marketers use them, you’ll have to figure out a unique and creative way of sharing your product pictures, especially if you want to increase your email conversion rate by being competitive.
2. Personalize
Personalization is another highly effective email conversions tactic. In fact, personalized emails are more likely to be opened and clicked on, as they seem more relevant and custom made for the recipient.
So, how do you employ personalization in your email marketing strategy? Besides adding a personalized subject line and greeting, you want to segment your audience to tailor custom messages.
Segment your recipients based on the products they’re most likely to purchase. Collect data on user preferences and use them to customize recommendations. Send out emails featuring recommendations based on the products users have already viewed, added to their shopping cart, or a wishlist.
3. Employ persuasion techniques
Persuasion is a term often used in marketing, and chances are you’ve heard it a lot before. However, it’s also important for improving email conversion rates.
Persuasion in marketing implies not only influencing people’s buying decisions, but also helping them shape a more positive attitude towards your brand, which will encourage them to convert.
Emotional appeal is something you should definitely consider when developing your email conversion strategy. While B2B marketers typically focus on logos (appeal to logic and reason) when addressing their audience, B2C professionals should apply pathos (appeal to emotions and feelings) to the center of their email strategy.
Source: Charles H Stewart
Experts from Ivory Research highlight the importance of creating email content that’ll resonate with your recipients and produce an emotional impact on them. One way to do so is by establishing shared values.
For example, if data shows that your audience is interested in preserving the environment, you want to use email to tell more about your own sustainable choices and eco-friendly production.
4. Include a strong call to action
If your data suggests that recipients are opening and reading your emails, but there’s no increase in conversions, consider evaluating your CTAs. CTAs are the cornerstone of your strategy when you’re looking to increase your email conversion rate, so be sure to do adequate testing.
Your prospects can’t possibly convert into customers if they don’t know how. You must lead your recipients to take action. In order to do that, all the CTAs should be strong, inviting, and self-explanatory.
Show what’s in it for the recipients.
Your CTA must describe a clear benefit that the prospect will receive once they’ve completed the action.
Provide clear instructions.
The CTA can be as simple as “Subscribe now,” “See more,” or “Add to cart.” Make it as direct and actionable as possible.
Use social proof.
In some cases, you can employ social proof to get your recipients to complete the desired action. For example, you can state that X customers have already purchased the product this week or that X people have already subscribed.
5. A/B test
As a marketer, you want to know for sure which elements of your strategy work well and which need further improvements. A/B testing a great tool you can use to figure out which elements cause more conversions.
What exactly is A/B testing?
A/B testing (a.k.a. split testing) is the evaluation performance method that implies sending different versions of content to the different halves of your audience to see which one works better. You can A/B test different elements of your email, including your subject line, body, personalized pieces, visuals, and more.
This testing method provides you with hard data on what actually causes more conversions. You can later use this information to adjust your email pieces and, thus, increase conversions.
Get the A/B testing guide.
6. Responsive emails
As we move further from desktop computers to portable devices, you want to make sure your emails are responsive and mobile-friendly. If you’re not particularly sure whether you need responsive emails or not, take a look at the numbers. You’ll be surprised to learn that emails that aren’t displayed correctly on mobile devices may be deleted within three seconds.
That’s why you want to make sure your emails can be opened on the whole spectrum of devices. Consider not only smartphones, tablets, and laptops, but also devices like the Apple Watch. Build a logical content hierarchy that’ll make sense across all devices.
What kinds of emails should you send to increase conversions?
Now that you’ve discovered the most effective marketing strategies, read on to see which kinds of emails are the most useful for increasing conversions.
Besides classic promotional emails, you want to make sure to send the following emails:
Thank you emails
When it comes to thank you emails, timing is paramount. You want to send thank you emails in these cases:
- After new subscribers signed up to your email list
- After your service has been used or tried for free
- After a purchase
Use thank you emails as a genuine gesture and a pipeline for the next steps. Besides showing that you’re grateful, share a little more information about your company and other related products.
Life events emails
Show appreciation for your recipients’ life events. For example, you can send special happy birthday and subscription anniversary emails. Here’s a great example of Nike’s happy birthday email.
Source: Business2Community
Recommendations
As we’ve mentioned before, personalized recommendations are particularly effective in increasing conversion rates. Don’t forget that audience segmentation is key to well-crafted personalized recommendation pieces.
Wrap up
As you can see, many factors are contributing to email conversions.
When developing your email marketing strategy, make sure your pieces include the following:
- Responsive design
- Strong and clickable CTAs
- Previously A/B tested elements
- Compelling visuals
- Personalized elements
- Persuasion elements
Now that you’ve learned about the most effective conversion strategies, it’s time to start adjusting your email efforts.
Alyse Falk is a freelance writer with experience in digital marketing, technologies, content marketing, marketing trends, and branding strategies. Alyse also writes for several reputable sites where she shares her hints for creating content.
