Email Conversion Rate

The email conversion rate is the metric that helps to sum up the results of a particular email campaign and identify its efficiency. Usually, a purchase after a click on the link in the email counts as a conversion.

Email Conversion Rate Formula

You can evaluate your marketing efforts and calculate ROI counting any user’s action as conversion. For instance, registration on your partner’s website via the link in your emails may count as conversion, as well.

To calculate an email conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the number of delivered emails and multiply it by 100, like on the image below.

If 200 people make a purchase, with 10,000 emails delivered, your conversion rate will be 2%.

What is a reasonable email conversion rate for email marketing?

Marketers can’t answer this question because the conversion rate depends on several factors that make averaging impossible. These are the niche of your business, actions you count as conversion, your average deal price, and bulk email provider you use.

B2B companies tend to have a lower conversion rate than B2C brands because of the higher average check. The number of conversions also varies between industries as a result of the different levels of user engagement, measured with the open and click-through rates. According to MailChimp, both these rates are lower for apparel, fashion, and cosmetics, and higher for non-profit organizations.

The email conversion rate also depends on the type of email. It tends to be higher for triggered emails like welcome, abandoned cart, and reactivation emails because they help to stay in touch with subscribers at every lifecycle stage. On the other hand, the conversion rate is lower for newsletters and promotional emails because they are less personalized mass emails, usually the same for all users.

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Having that knowledge at hand, you can define a reasonable conversion rate for your business with specific conversion goals.

You can do a lot to improve the email conversion rate, so pay attention to the following pieces of advice.

• Improve your email deliverability. Use a double opt-in to communicate only with the owners of valid email addresses. Regularly remove inactive addresses from your mailing list. Set up DKIM, DMARK, and SPF records to improve your sender reputation. Check emails for spam with SendPulse.
• Increase the number of opens and clicks. Follow these subject line best practices to encourage more opens. Support subject lines with a preheader text relevant to the email content place a clear call-to-action in the email. A/B test both subject lines and CTAs. Find out the right time for sending emails to your audience, and pick up the correct email sending frequency.
• Provide personalized experience. Start from adding the user’s name to the subject line and email body. Send trigger emails and drip email campaigns based on subscribers’ actions. Segment your audience into groups with some common characteristics like location, gender, and age. Analyze user behavior to implement more advanced behavioral segmentation.
• Make the check out fast and straightforward. Make as few steps as possible. If the user doesn’t complete the purchase, follow up with abandoned cart emails. Some percent of potential clients will come back and finish the shopping.

References

1. The article “Email Conversion Rate 101” by Instapage provides recommendations on how to calculate the email conversion rate.
2. The article “Conversion Rate Optimization” by HubSpot gives actionable tips to optimize your content and increase the number of email conversions.

Last Updated: 22.03.2023