Email marketing has long been a staple instrument in the arsenal of many businesses. Contemporary marketing strategies have evolved over the past decade to include the likes of social media and influencer marketing. It is true that email marketing now constitutes only part of the wider marketing picture – but it would be incomplete without it.
Email marketing proudly holds the 3rd place in small business marketing tactics in the USA.
This old school form of marketing is imperative to expanding your client list and can help to nurture the relationship between your business and your target audience. It is an avenue through which to establish customer loyalty and an increase in sales. However, this approach is only open to those who perfectly optimise their email marketing campaign to allow for the highest conversion rates possible.
Conversion rates are an important metric for most marketers. They’re essentially an indicator of ROI. A highly optimised email marketing strategy can allow you to gain more value from users you already have, increase return on investment and grow your business. For many, the ‘conversion goal’ is to generate leads and drive sales. In such instances, the ability to directly correlate the success of email marketing to a verified and specific number in terms of sales associated with the conversion rate is a much-needed metric in marketing strategising.
An underperforming email marketing campaign in terms of conversion rate might be attributable to 2 things. First, your subscribers have no motive to buy from you and only provided you with their email in exchange for something. Second, you have not efficiently segmented your list and those you’re sending introductory emails to are already existing customers.
With this in mind, particular focus should be placed on optimising your email marketing campaign with conversion rates in mind.
1. Refine your subject line
The importance of your subject line cannot be understated. Although the body of your email will contain the important nitty-gritty details of your focus, your subject line is the overriding factor in need of immediate optimisation. It is more likely than not, the first piece of text the recipient will come into contact with. It has the capacity to elevate or demote your conversion rates.
Your subject line should generate a sense of urgency to encourage the reader to open the email. When they do, it is vital to ensure that your content accommodates tour subject line. If it doesn’t, you should expect to see a decrease in your conversion rates as most of your readers will just be plain mad at you. However, if you create a subject line that piques at the curiosity of your reader and then provides them with valuable content that complements the subject line, they’re more likely to explore your brand further.
Image Source: Sumo
2. Get personal
When crafting your email strategy, your most vital tool is your mailing list. Without it, you can’t get personal. Everybody loves a little personalisation, especially when it comes to receiving something in the post- whether it’s through the front door or their email inbox.
A personalisation strategy within your email marketing could promote greater open rates, click-through rates and boost sales. When done correctly, research indicates that personalised email campaigns land 29% higher open rates and 41% higher click-through rates than those that do not get personal. By personally addressing your audience you could improve your conversion rates by an average of 10% (Experian).
Go beyond simply including your recipient’s name. The age in which we live gives you an abundance of data at your fingertips, use it. Be sure to ask the right questions and segment your email list properly. Don’t thank new customers for returning, rather be sure to send an appropriate message. Make your emails location and time sensitive. This will add to the degree of personalisation and encourage readers to engage.
3. Optimise call-to-actions
In order to realise better conversion rates, one of two things has to happen. Either the recipient of your email wants what you are offering and so pursues further consumer research, or they take immediate action upon correspondence. For either of these to take effect, there should be a clearly stated, user-friendly and compelling call to action (CTA).
These can take the shape of a button or hyperlinked text that redirects a user to the intended page. This page presents them with the opportunity to learn about your brand and make a purchase. In turn, this increases the likelihood of your conversion rates being lifted. These simple but effective buttons and links have an ultra way of transforming email marketing campaigns.
Keep your conversion goals in mind. CTA’s that encourage purchasing, for example, might include hyperlinked texts like ‘shop now, save 50%, buy now, get free shipping’. If your conversion rates account for those who subscribe, make sure your calls to action are seen with phrases like ‘subscribe now, sign up and save, subscribe here’.
Netflix has a great example of an effective CTA.
Image Source: Netflix
4. Make it sharable
Incorporating sharable content into your email marketing strategy is critical in affirming your customer’s causes and beliefs. Typically if your customers believe in what you’re saying and can identify with it, they are more likely to share the content. The only thing you have to do is create the most relevant and informative content and leave the shares to your audience.
Social media shares exponentially increase the value of your content with every share and the value of your email marketing campaign increases simultaneously. Making this happen is relatively easy, you just have to be in it to win it. First thing’s first, pique at the interest of your audience with a clickable subject line. Once they’re in, use the body of your copy to provide relevant and enticing content. The bottom line is, very few people will consider sharing boring content on social media. Make it exciting, newsworthy and sharable.
Image Source: Oracle
Think carefully about who you want to share your content. Evidence suggests a positive impact on consumer purchasing behaviour with influencer endorsement. Getting influential people and organisations to share your content is not easy and requires some strategic planning ahead.
Essentially, influential people need proof that your content is worthy of sharing. The content should be validated before reaching out to influencers. Use your email marketing campaign to pick up the momentum of your social shares.
Once your content has picked up a couple of hundred shares, take this opportunity to reach out to influencers and bigger sites to show them the potential of your content that everyone seems to love. They’ll be more inclined to get involved and instantly contribute to boosting your conversion rates.
SendBloom turns leads into opportunities with personal and persistent sales campaigns. This tool allows you to automate emails from your personal Gmail account and run more than one campaign at once without being marked as spam. More importantly, it’s vital to make the content easily sharable and to actively invite your audience to share via social media. Adding share buttons is easy to do with MailChimp. Incorporate specific social media buttons like the Facebook like button to encourage audience engagement and promote your content.
Don’t forget to upload your subscriber lists to social media (Twitter LinkedIn and Facebook) and retarget ads on these platforms for people who clicked your email. This is a sure way to grab the attention of those who matter most and encourage conversion.
5. Useful Plugins
Some WordPress plugins significantly simplify the entire process of sending out emails to users and have been found to increase conversions by taking over the responsibility for your campaign. Others help in the development of a healthy subscriber list on which email marketing optimisation depends.
Using these plugins gives you more control over what you want to send and who to send it to. It makes it possible to send thousands of newsletters and emails to your users and can be set up in a matter of minutes. The following WordPress plugins were specifically designed to optimise email marketing, with special attention to conversion rates. Though, you’ll probably find an abundance of plugins for email marketing optimisation online.
MailChimp
This email giant offers a free plan that allows you to send up to 10,000 emails a month to 2,000 subscribers. Whilst quality matters more than quantity – you have to be in the game to win it. The ability to send vast volumes of emails per month gives your conversion rates a better chance to grow. MailChimp also has a pay-as-you-go option that is often favoured by low-volume clients. This option will open the doors to more extras like automation and integration options.
When you connect your site to MailChimp, you can set benchmarks to compare how your emails are measuring up to the average email marketing metrics, like open, click, bounce and complaint rates. This is a useful way to adjust and tweak your marketing strategy in the future to ensure better comparative rates and ultimately, boost your conversions.
OptinMonster
One of the most impressive lead generation plugins available to you. It allows you to create stunning attention-grabbing opt-in forms that are proven to convert well. Essentially, this plugin will strengthen your powers in converting website visitors into subscribers and customers.
OptinMonster combines page-level targeting and behaviour automation to instantly boost conversion rates up to 785%.
So, here we are. I hope these five steps can help you skyrocket your email marketing conversion rates.