Everyone wants higher open rates and higher conversion rates for their email marketing campaigns. But it can be difficult to understand how to get customers to open your email messages and convert – especially if you don’t have much experience with email marketing strategies, or you’re a small business owner trying to run your own campaigns.
So in this blog, we’ll take a look at a few ways you can boost email conversion rates. Follow these steps for optimizing your email newsletters and messages, and you’re sure to find success.
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1. Don’t Buy Email Lists – It’s Always A Bad Idea
First, let’s start with a common mistake that new entrepreneurs and business owners make when investing in email marketing – buying a list of email addresses from online sources.
On the surface, this seems like a great way to reach more customers quickly. But in reality, these lists are usually filled with junk emails, and even if they contain real email addresses, it’s unlikely that the owner of that email address will perceive your emails as anything other than spam.
Correspondingly, you can expect really low conversion rates if you buy email lists. Most people you’re emailing have not expressed any interest in what you have to offer – so they won’t click and convert.
In contrast, if you build up your email address list organically by getting existing or potential customers to sign up, you’ll get much higher conversion rates because these people have already expressed interest in what you have to offer – they’ll be much more likely to click and convert.
2. Send Relevant Emails That Are Actually Useful And Interesting
When you sit down to write an email to send to your customers, you need to ask yourself one simple question.
- What does this email have to offer?
Your email needs to offer something. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a coupon or something else of value, but it needs to offer some kind of insight, be useful, interesting, or appealing to your customers in some way.
3. Make Sure Your Email Templates Are Optimized For Mobile Devices
Nearly half of all emails are opened on mobile devices. The best way to make sure your email designs and templates are mobile-friendly is to use a modern email marketing tool like MailChimp, which offers designs that work on screens of all sizes.
If you don’t support mobile devices, you could be losing out on almost half of your customers – and your conversion rates will suffer accordingly.
4. Use Clear Calls-To-Action (CTAs) And Landing Pages
A Call-To-Action (CTA) is some kind of action that you want an email viewer to take when they view your email. For example, if you’re sending an email to advertise a sale at a shoe store, this could be “SHOP NOW.”
Every email should contain a CTA of some kind. Without a CTA, customers won’t have a clear way to convert and take an action – even if they want to! CTAs are absolutely essential for effective marketing emails.
Landing pages are also related, so we’ll mention them, too. A landing page is a special website page that’s designed to move a customer further down the sales funnel. Usually, when a customer clicks a CTA, they will go to a landing page.
Using our above example of a shoe store again, you could create a landing page with more information about which styles are on sale, and get customers to start shopping right away. This is sure to increase your clickthrough rate.
5. Utilize “Lead Magnets” To Convert Customers With Special Offers & More
A “lead magnet” is any special offer that’s designed to capture customer interest. These usually take the form of special offers – free meals, coupons and sales, discounts, free resources like eBooks and whitepapers, free webinars, and other such things, depending on your industry.
These offers are great for increasing conversion rates. If a customer feels like they’re getting something for their trouble, they’re much likely to open your email and convert.
6. Write Eye-Catching & Urgent Email Subject Lines
Email subject lines are really hard to write. You only get about 40-60 characters – usually about 6-9 words – to convince someone to click on your email and convert.
There are a lot of techniques you can use, but one of the simplest and most effective things you can do is create a sense of urgency around your offer by using language like:
- Limited time
- Ends soon
- Don’t wait
- Don’t miss out
- Time-sensitive
- Act now
And so on – you get the idea. Integrating these terms into your email subject lines means that a viewer is more likely to click it and open it right away, rather than coming back to it later.
7. Add Visuals To Increase The Appeal Of Your Emails
The days of “plaintext” emails are behind us. With modern email tools, it’s easy to make rich, appealing, and attractive email templates that help boost your brand image and look great.
So think about how you can add more visual appeal to your emails. We recommend taking steps like:
- Breaking up text into small, manageable chunks with bullet points, HTML headers, and other such elements
- Adding stock photos, emojis, illustrations, GIFs, video, and other multimedia elements when possible
- Maintaining a consistent visual style across all of your emails to add brand credibility
- Use reflowable templates to make sure that your emails look good and consistent across screens of all sizes including phones, tablets, laptops and desktops
8. A/B Test Your Emails To Get Insights On Their Performance
A/B testing, also known as “split testing” is the practice of sending out two similar – yet slightly different – emails to track each one’s performance.
For example, you could send out two emails advertising a discount on an oil change at your auto shop, with two different subject lines:
- Schedule an oil change now for a 20% discount at [Auto Shop Name]
- Need an oil change? Come To [Auto Shop Name] today!
Then, you can measure the overall performance of each email – including its open rate, click-through rate and conversion rate, and other such metrics.
This allows you to understand what does – and doesn’t – work for your customers, and provides you with valuable insights that can help inform future email marketing campaigns.
9. Use Market Segmentation To Your Advantage
Market segmentation is a great way to boost conversion rates by using different emails to target distinct groups of people.
How does this work? Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you run a dog grooming service. You could send out different emails to a few different types of customers:
- For customers who have come in recently, you could send an email asking them to review your services – or to book a follow-up for their dog right away so that they don’t forget.
- For customers who have not come into your store recently, you could send an email offering a 10% discount on their next service – encouraging them to come back and start using your services again.
- For new customers who have signed up for your email list but have not yet brought their dog into your facility, you could send an email outlining your services, how you care for animals at your business, and offering a “first-time” discount when they bring their dog in for grooming.
These 3 types of customers are very different – and by providing them with customized and specially-targeted offers, you’d be able to boost conversion rates more than you would if you simply sent a generic email to your entire email list.
Need More Help Boosting Conversion Rates? Contact Australian Internet Advertising!
If you’re having trouble improving your email sales funnel or converting customers and you don’t have the time to spend on improving your email marketing strategies, you need the help of a team of experienced digital marketers – such as Australian Internet Advertising.
At AIAD, we specialise in email marketing, social media marketing, SEO for websites, and much more, and we work with small businesses throughout Sydney, NSW, and Australia to help them improve their digital marketing efforts – and bring in more customers.
To learn more and get started, just contact us online or give us a call at 1300 304 640. We’d be happy to discuss our services in further detail, and explain how we can help you build a better business with our digital marketing expertise.
