Your 8 Step Guide to Increasing Email Conversion Rates

Email marketing can be a tango between you and your customers, but the key to a successful campaign is your email conversion rate.

Regardless of where you may be, email marketing is still one of the most heavily relied-on and successful forms of marketing. While it may be the oldest form, there are no signs of stopping. It remains the primary success factor in terms of marketing ROI.

Email marketing has been known and proven that it is able to generate up to $40 per dollar spent. It should be no shock that marketers love email marketing. But that doesn’t mean that every campaign will be a successful one.

It takes a lot of trial and error and industry knowledge to hit such a high return rate. If you’re struggling to generate leads or convert visitors with your email campaigns, you probably should take a look at the nitty-gritty details of your campaign.

When it comes to building your own email strategy, what is most successful for your company heavily depends on your target audience and their preferences. Regardless of what industry you work in, everyone wants the same outcome from their email marketing campaigns, and conversions.

By editing specific elements of your email campaign it has the potential to improve your conversion rates. The key is to figure out which changes would be the most effective. Sometimes, something as easy as changing a subject line can be the one element that will take your campaign from low conversion rates to high.

Here is your strategy to increase your email conversion rates

1. Personalize Your Emails

Honestly, not many people love reading long emails filled with corporate lingo and dense information. Even if they do open an email like that, it won’t be long before they put it right in the trashcan. This also definitely does not help your conversion rates.

As a rule of thumb, make your emails sound like they are coming from an actual person, and even better if it sounds like it’s someone who works within the company as well. You can even take it a step further by ensuring that your reply address is the same as the one who sent the email. You can encourage replies and start discussions via email to improve engagement rates with your customers as well.

People value when they feel that a message was specifically designed for them. For example, you can include their first name in the subject line and opening sentence. You can personalize the campaigns into specific niches when you know that certain customers like a certain product or service based on their purchase history.

Some companies also go as bold as to send emails that are not in any special template, no promotional imagery, just raw email. You’re writing an email, not a pamphlet or a detailed infographic. The email was designed for person-to-person communication, so why should a company to a personal email be any different?

The better personalization an email has, it will be more likely that a customer will open the email, click the CTA, and convert.

2. Segment Your Lists

You’re able to craft the best emails, with the best subject lines, and an amazing CTA but if you’re sending it to the wrong people, none of it will matter. Segmentation is dividing your email list into specific categories based on your customers. It is critical for ensuring your emails go to the right people and increase your chances of conversions.

Regardless of what you’re promoting or selling, you need to make sure that the action that you want the recipients to take is aligned with the lists of contacts you are sending it to. The more segmented your list is, the better.

By segmenting your list you are making sure that the information you are providing your customers is something that they are genuinely interested in. This not only helps improve personalization but also helps form a better foundation of trust. Your customers will then start to notice that your emails provide value to them and will know it’s not a waste of their time to open.

The actual segments that you choose will be based on your company and its products or services and what type of email you’re sending and what the desired action is. Some examples of list segments:

• Age
• Gender
• Buyer Persona
• Area of Interest
• Product

Segmenting your lists will help further personalize your lists and increase relevance for your recipients. Relevance is one of the most important factors that will help you retain and nurture your existing customers.

Understand the distinct groups of people that make up your list. Segmentation is about understanding the needs of your customers and having an open form of communication with them.

3. Tell a Story

This goes hand in hand with the personalization of your email campaigns. You are able to engage your readers, even more, when they are able to connect with you. Storytelling is a powerful marketing technique that will captivate your audience. By using the storytelling technique it’s a great way to have your readers engaged all the way to the end of the email and reach the call to action.

It also gives you the opportunity to connect with your subscribers and make your campaigns more personal and effective. By drawing readers into emails, it will increase your email conversion rates because if recipients made it all the way through the story they’re more likely to complete your call to action.

4. Automate Your Drip Campaigns and Use Behavioral Triggers

You can use opting in as a behavior trigger for your subscribers. There are various tools and strategies that you can use to automate your campaigns and respond to particular actions.

By implementing behavior trigger emails, after an action is completed your campaign will automatically get sent out based on this action. They help drive better conversion rates because they are sent immediately after a particular action so subscribers are more likely to respond based on something they actually did.

For example, you can set up automated emails as responses based on the following triggers or events:

• Pageviews, or content downloads
• Welcome email when a prospect converts
• Top of the funnel conversion events
• Clicks, visits, or form submissions
• Inactive or dormant subscribers after X amount of time
• Registration or signaling attendance
• Past purchase trigger (upsell email)
• Upcoming purchase reminder
• Bottom of the funnel conversions

There are many other instances where using automated campaigns to communicate with subscribers is beneficial. But, you need to keep in mind relevancy. Make sure that your automated campaigns are still relevant to those you send and provide value to your recipients. This will help you increase the chances of conversions.

5. Have a Strong CTA

Just like any other content you create, your email can contain a few different calls to action. You may want your readers to click a link that leads to a converting landing page or you may want them to actually respond to the email.

Regardless, you need to make sure that your calls to action are as clear as possible. You should always include something that is easily readable and without any questions. For example, use a CTA such as “click here for” or “download now” so that there is absolutely no confusion for your users. If you’re promoting a video you can use a GIF with a play button that can take a user directly to the video on a new web page.

Users never want to do any extra work. You need to make sure that your call to action directly leads to wherever you want your users to convert. If you are able to create a clear and easy process for your users, it takes out any extra unnecessary steps for them that could distract them from converting.

6. Make Sure Your Emails Are Mobile Friendly

Now more than ever emails are being received and read on mobile devices and this trend shows no signs of stopping. This piece of information should be enough motivation to ensure that you are mobile optimizing your email campaigns. Even take into account the fact that the subject line is also being read on a mobile device so it shouldn’t be more than what a screen can handle.

To create a great mobile-optimized email take into consideration the following tips:

• Have shorter subject lines (AKA only 30-35 characters)
• Have your text broken up so it is easily scannable
• Use a single-column layout, use the short and concise copy
• Large font to improve readability
• Make all links easily visible and clickable
• Your CTA should be bigger and to the right landing page
• Reduce the size of any images to shorten the loading time

When you mobile-optimize your emails make sure that you test them to see which elements are working properly and which do not. You can run an A/B test to evaluate any changes you may have made to see how your segments react to them. This will not only help you increase your conversion rates but will also give you a better understanding of your customers or subscribers.

7. Run A/B Testing

A/B testing is a way to research user experience methodology. It can consist of a randomized experiment with two variables (A and B). This means that it also utilizes statistical hypothesis testing (or two sample hypothesis testing) to see which receives more of the desired outcome.

In email marketing, A/B testing would be two emails and one with an element or variable that is different from the original (the control). You will then send out both emails to see which one your customers are responding to more and from there you are able to analyze what works and what doesn’t in your email marketing campaign.

For example in an A/B test, it could be the difference of buttons over in-text links or bullet points versus paragraphs. You can test your email campaign content structure and edit templates to see what works best. After the emails have been running for a period of time, you will then be able to make adjustments that will help increase your conversions.

If you haven’t yet established what works best for your audience — test it. A/B tests are a great way to find out things like whether your readers prefer buttons over in-text links or bullets over paragraphs. You can even test things like structure or templates to discover what works best.

Just be sure when testing to only change one element at a time in an email to make sure you can do an accurate analysis of your results.

8. Have a Clean Email Marketing List

Your conversion rate also depends a lot on the fact of if your emails actually get delivered or not. When you have a list of thousands and thousands of email addresses, you can send out as many campaigns as you want but it all depends if it ever gets delivered.

The cold hard truth is that your email lists decay and depreciate as time goes on. People change email addresses, could have used a temporary address, inputted their name wrong, and a million other things. So if you are sending out emails to people who don’t exist or spam traps you could be temporarily banned from sending emails in general. This is called getting blacklisted and it’s an email marketer’s personal headache.

If you want to increase your conversion rate, make sure that you have a clean email list and know that your hard work will get delivered to the intended recipients. This also helps protect your sender reputation score and helps guarantee that you will avoid blacklists at all costs.

Sending emails is not enough. You need to have them delivered. Improve your deliverability and email marketing campaign ROI with the most reliable and affordable email checker. The best solution is Emailable: you will be able to maintain a clean and healthy list as well as increase your conversion rates.