When it comes to marketing and sales, success rates for email are higher than any other channel. For many marketers, however, email marketing can be a bit of a mystery.
This is particularly true when you run a campaign that succeeds in some ways but fails in others (e.g. the campaign earns a high email open rate, yet its conversion rates are low).
How to Determine Conversion Rates in Email Marketing
Low email marketing conversion rates are a sign that your email is not doing its job well enough and that your campaign has to be tweaked in some areas to optimize it.
What are email marketing conversion rates?
Every email campaign must have a goal. It may be to get your subscribers to download a resource, buy a product, or sign up for a service. The number of subscribers that respond positively and carry out your desired actions are called conversions.
Your conversion rate for email marketing is the percentage of subscribers who take the required action in your email campaign.
How to Calculate Email Marketing Conversion Rate
Calculating the conversion rate for your email marketing campaign can be done using this simple formula:
Email Marketing Conversion Rate = Number of Conversions / Number of Delivered Emails ×100
In calculating your email marketing conversion rates, be sure to use the correct number for delivered emails. Delivered emails are the number of emails sent minus those that bounced.
For example, if you sent out 10 emails in your campaign and, out of those 10 emails, 2 bounced, then the total number of delivered emails is 8. Going further, if, out of those 8 emails, 4 subscribers complete the goal you had for the email campaign, it means your number of conversions is 4.
Plugging all this data into our formula gives us an email marketing conversion rate of 50%.
Does it really matter?
Knowing your email marketing conversion rate and how to calculate it is very important, as it helps you determine your email marketing ROI. In essence, your conversion rate is the ultimate answer to whether your email campaign was successful or not.
What is a good email marketing conversion rate?
There is no set answer to this question, as there are many factors that influence your email campaign that are different from other campaigns. One of these factors is email type.
Source: Movable Ink
Some of those factors include:
- Location
- Demographics
- Email copy
- Industry
- Your offer
The best answer to this question is: if your conversion rate is good enough to help you meet your goals, it’s a good conversion rate. That being said, you should always strive to attain better email conversion rates in each of your subsequent email campaigns.
To help you gauge your own conversion rate, you can compare your rates to those of other marketers in a similar industry.
What now?
In order for you to get the best results out of your email marketing, you will need to keep tabs on many of the metrics involved. Your email marketing conversion rate is one such metric.
Now that you know what it is, why it’s important, and how to calculate it for yourself, try revisiting past campaigns and practice on them.
If you feel you need help in improving your email marketing conversion rates, check out our article that highlights the common causes for low email marketing conversion rates.