The major goal of a business website — whether it’s a B2B, B2C, or an eCommerce company — is to get conversions or sales. And when it comes to assisting conversions, the email marketing channel is one of the most effective channels.
Many companies use the email marketing channel to improve their conversions. For example, Reliance Retail Limited (a Juvlon client) finds email marketing to be “the most effective & best way to promote [their] Loyalty program.” Now, of course, as a customer’s loyalty grows, they keep making repeat purchases with the same business.
Email marketing’s ROI is also the highest among all marketing channels. But when it comes to maximizing email marketing campaigns, most email marketers only think about the big picture. They only optimize their campaigns for goals like getting sales, warming up leads or nurturing the user-company relationship. And often forget about micro conversions are an important part to achieve macro conversions goals. Optimizing micro conversions like open rate and click through rate in email marketing is necessary to push users for macro conversions like purchase. Refer this guide to optimize email marketing macro goals in order to achieve macro goals. It is the series of micro-goals or micro-conversions that lead to the main goal.
Think about it like this:
Main goal or conversion: Generate X sales/leads/traffic from the email campaign.
Micro-conversions: Get X% open rate. Get Y% click-through rate. Get Z SPAM complaint instances.
Getting the most conversions is only possible by optimizing for all the micro-conversions. Let’s now see some of the most important email marketing micro-conversions that impact an email marketing campaign’s bottom line.
Email Open Rate
While there’s no standard industry email open rate, most email marketers believe that a “healthy open rate is in the 20% – 40% range.”
Open rate as a micro-conversion
Suppose the main goal of your current email marketing campaign is to generate X% more sales than your last campaign.
Now, do a little reserve engineering and see how many opens were needed to beat your last target. Based on your findings, calculate how many more email opens you’re going to need in your current email campaign to meet its sales goal.
Unless you get more people to open your email, it’s very unlikely that you’ll hit your sales or the main goal of your campaign.
Here are a few tactics to get higher open rates:
Use a relevant email subject line.
As per Convince&Convert, about “35% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone.” So, write a subject line that makes your email pop in your subscriber’s inbox. You can try adding an emoji to your subject line to do so. Emojis aren’t uncommon in marketing messages, in fact, its use grew by a steady 20% every month in 2016. Also, to find out what subject lines work for your audience, set up email subject line A/B tests.
Write personalized subject lines
Experian Marketing Services conducted a research and found that personalized subject lines can boost open rates by up to a whopping 41%. When a recipient’s name is included in the subject line, it immediately draws the recipient’s attention — the effect is similar to hearing your name being called out!
Select the best weekday and time during the day to get the best possible open rate
Even a great email subject fails when the email’s timing is wrong. Again, there’s no one standard day or time when you must send your email. But here’s data that shows the best day and time and to send an email blast based on the industry. Pick a few times and days and do A/B testing to see what days/times work for your subscribers.
2. Click-through Rate
The average click-through across email campaigns in different industries is about 4.19%. Typically only a quarter of the recipients/subscribers open the emails and less than 5% tend to click.
Click-through rate as a micro-conversion
Taking forward the same sales goal example from above. If you need to meet your email marketing campaign’s main sales goal, you’ll also have to get a higher or comparable click-through rate. If you get more opens but don’t get more clicks, again, meeting your main goal will be difficult. Here are a few tactics that to get higher click-through rates:
Write an action-oriented CTA
Your email CTA button copy must use an actionable message.
For example:
- Buy Now
- Book a Demo
- Enroll Now
- Watch Now
Such a CTA is much more powerful and prompts more clicks as compared to CTAs like “Here’s the link to buy,” “Demo Registration,” “Enrollment Link” and so on. Your CTA button must also stand out in a loud color.
Email design layout
An email’s layout has a direct impact on its click-through rate. By just redesigning the blog email, many companies have increased their click-throughs in email. So check out your current email layout and see if the CTA is loud and prominent. If not, consider redesigning the layout so the focus is on the CTA.
Personalize the email copy
Personalized emails get about 2.5 times higher click-through rates than non-personalized emails. So find ways to personalize your email. Here are some great email personalization tips.
SPAM Complaint Rate
For most email service providers like Juvlon, it’s okay if one in thousand people mark your email as SPAM. While even that shouldn’t happen – but if it does, it can be “tolerated”. The SPAM complaint rate metric shows your reputation as a sender, so you won’t keep the metric as low as possible.
SPAM complaint rate as a micro-conversion:
No matter what type of marketing emails you send and what their goals are, you must always keep an eye on your email SPAM complaint rate and find ways to bring it down. When your recipient marks your email as SPAM, you don’t just lose the subscriber but you also get a downvote as a sender. If you repeatedly get a high SPAM complaint rate, your email service provider can even blacklist you. So, bringing down your email SPAM complaint rate is always a micro-conversion. Here are a few tactics to bring down your email SPAM complaint rate:
Add an “Unsubscribe” option
Add an easily accessible opt-out option like a link to “Unsubscribe” in your email footer. By making unsubscribing easy for your readers, you’ll be able to drastically reduce the instances of your emails being marked as SPAM. About 50% of consumers mark an email as SPAM if they find the unsubscribe process to be painful or confusing.
Don’t over email
Lots of times, email marketers send multiple email blasts to their subscribers just because they need to hit the sales numbers. While this tactic might get the sales, it also invites a large number of SPAM flaggings. Naturally, when the users who expect to get an email a week are bombarded with an email each day, they’ll want to complain. So, stick to your sending frequency – don’t over email.
Write honest subject lines
One of the most common reasons for SPAM complaints is a misleading subject line. There are many ways to improve your subject line copy and improve your email open rate, so never “trick” the recipient into opening your email.
Wrapping it up ….
Optimizing an email campaign for its micro goals is as important as optimizing it for its main goals. Without hitting the micro-goals, hitting the main goal is rather unlikely. For some thorough micro-conversion optimization, you’ll need an email marketing platform like Juvlon that doesn’t just show you your email campaign’s overall performance like the amount of revenue generated but also gives statistics on the open rate, the click-through rate, and the instances of SPAM reporting.
The Juvlon team will help you to plan successful email marketing strategies. Try our platform for free now!