Performance Marketing - How to Improve Email Conversion

In the competitive realm of marketing, enhancing conversion rates is imperative for optimizing marketing performance improvement. As dedicated marketers, it is essential to curate a comprehensive database filled with target customers that bolster your business's longevity. Mastering the nuances of conversion and discerning strategic alterations are crucial for sustaining a robust marketing performance.

Understanding Conversion in Email Marketing

Conversion is a multifaceted concept that spans various channels and funnel stages. This exposition centers on email marketing as a vehicle for conversion, with future discussions exploring web conversion and other funnel stages such as nurture and retention programmes.

 This blog specifically focusses on email as a conversion. A later blog will cover web conversion, but you can check out our other blogs on other stages of the funnel including nurture, re-activation. or retention programmes.

1Email Automation and Triggers

Our conversion programmes expertly utilize pivotal buying moments like abandoned carts or purchase anniversaries. Leveraging automation, particularly with trigger emails aligned to specific user actions, is integral to success. According to the DMA, trigger programmes account for over 75% of email revenue, underscoring their potency in conversion.

• Behavioural Triggers: Examples such as abandoned shopping cart or browse triggers are crucial. These triggers, executed promptly after consumer actions, include items engaged with by the consumer, provide alternatives, suggest product groupings, and simplify the checkout process through cart auto-completion— all enhancing conversion rates significantly.
• Re-activation Emails: Target prospects who have disengaged by sending timely reactivation emails. Craft compelling messages that reignite interest and encourage repeated engagement.
• Re-engagement emails can keep a prospect warm, or a customer loyal – so make sure that you have a programme set up for each audience based on their stage in your funnel. Target users throughout their lifecycle journey and keep the engagement going. It helps build trust and loyalty.

2.   Relevance through Segmentation

With the plethora of 1st party data we now collect in areas such as email and website browse behaviour. As well as the zero party data that a user knowingly gives us through things like form completions.  Email relevance no longer has to be as simple as ensuring the content contains what was promised from sign up or information the user showed interest in. 

According to Mailchimp, using segmentation in emails can earn over double the average clickthrough rates over generic ones.  So if you want to reap the rewards of double conversion – then you need to create segments and develop content specifically for each of these segments to ensure you are maximising your return.  

How to segment your subscriber for more conversions?

·       Analyse your data and define specific criteria based on derived (eg: lifestage, funnel stage) or known criteria (basket types, product choices).

·       Ensure to group audience with similar traits in the right segment

·       Create content specifically for these segments based upon these traits. But please ensure that you use broad basket or product categorisations so that you can

        take recommendations based upon the types of things they like as getting too specific in ongoing communications will limit your opportunities to communicate.

·       Personalise where you can beyond salutation to ensure that your emails appear more humanized..

3.   Write for Success

Before the reader even opens your email – they can now see both your subject line and preview text in their browser. We all use this as an effective way to screen our over full inboxes so it is crucial that your copywriter pays as much attention to these elements as they do the main body of the email.

You must write compelling and valuable content for your audience to boost conversions. But writing an email is much more than just the copy. So here’s our top tips on crafting a compelling email to get more conversions?

·      Create urgency, excitement or intrigue in your email subject lines.

·      Make sure to check the tone, wording, and style of your email writing.

·      Use visual elements such as carousels, gifs, icons, and emojis, to showcase content in your emails.

·      Use your segmentation to tailor content and copy for your target audiences’ interests or behaviours while writing your email copy.

·      Content should be on brand and on a subject that the customer wants to hear about – images, text and CTA devices are all part of the experience

4.   A/B test your emails

A/B testing your emails is a great way to ensure what's working and where you need to make changes to pump up your performance and drive up conversion. What’s more if you are segmenting your audiences – you can also understand which kind of emails resonate most with your them. ROI benchmarks from Hubspot suggest an 8-10% improvement on ROI when using A/B testing.

A/B testing should be undertaken systematically and consistently to ensure that your results are readable. But first you need to develop a series of benchmarks that you are seeking to improve. Tests should be kept to 1 variable ie: list, subject line, content or imagery etc. if you try to shortcut this process you will not know which variable is driving the improvements and you could be spending valuable money rolling out with poorer performing versions

A/B testing improves your email conversion but also helps inform your other marketing disciplines:

• Making data-backed decisions instead of guesswork.
• Enabling the testing of different email versions or content to different audiences or segments to determine which resonates most with them.
• A/B testing in email also lets you test specific propositions or approaches that can be rolled out to your other marketing channels. 
• If you A/B test well – you can use this to help define better messaging or content to drive up effectiveness in your mass email campaigns, recruitment and retention programmes as well.
• A/B testing allows you to test different elements from subject line to email call to action.

5.   Responsive Emails

As important as when your audience reads your email is understanding how their viewing them.   A report published by Litmus reveals that 43.5% of emails were read on mobile as of Q4 in 2020 – but in our experience, this can be much higher dependent upon your brand, or the age and lifestyle of your audience. Those with a younger consumer base will have a significantly higher rate than this. But whatever the rate – if you don’t optimise your email for both web and mobile users – you can’t guarantee that important messages will be seen. It is upto you as marketing professionals to ensure that every email you send is read – we advise clients to design for mobile and modify for desktops.  When making your emails mobile responsive to boost conversion – you should consider the following:

• Using larger font sizes to make them easier to read when scaled down.
• Design in single column – and ensures the piece is read in the order that you intended – prioritising your key messages to before the first scroll.
• Keep images small to reduce load time.
• Make sure to use the right-sized fonts for better readability.

6.   Interactive Experience

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is the new buzzword in email marketing. It's a way of making your email experience more interactive that will help with conversion.

One of the biggest factors impacting conversion is the time and steps required to complete a process. When users get a link to redirect to a browser for form or process completions, this creates friction, increases bounces and discourages completion.

AMP allows you to offer a seamless in-email interactive experience without the need to link.

According to google - 23.7% of marketers across different industries revealed nearly a 10% increase in their email conversions with AMP emails due to the elimination of friction within the email.

With AMP emails, the opportunities are endless, – think about the interactive journeys that your users enjoy online – you can now replicate these within an email such as booking a demo, filling out forms or surveys, completing transactions, gaming. 

Or enrich the email experience by adding dynamic elements such as image carousel, accordions, calendar, countdown timers, etc

7.   Data Collection

When trying to improve conversion, we often think about the obvious things like when and where to send communications or even what to include in them. However, in all of these forms of targeting, it will be limited by what at we already know or have derived from our users during their previous interactions with our business.

If we want to improve conversion, we would be best placed to develop a strategy for successful collection of additional zero or 1^st party data. As this will help us make better decisions about contact & content.  Understanding where they are in the purchase funnel, their broader interests or products viewed will help us to know when might be best to contact them and provide context for the correct content or product selections.   

Boosting Customer Value through Email Strategies

Utilizing data-driven marketing to improve customer retention and reduce churn is vital. With insights derived from customer data & insight, Relevanz Ltd pioneers strategies to maximize engagement rates and improve marketing ROI. By meticulously fostering customer relationships, businesses witness not only enhanced conversion but overall marketing performance improvement.

Contact Us for Expert Consultation

At Relevanz Ltd, located at Royal House, 110 Station Parade, Harrogate, HG1 1EP, we offer unmatched expertise in CRM marketing. Should you seek to maximize customer value and elevate your marketing strategies, we invite you to contact Julie Stead-Connor at julie@stead-connor.co.uk or call +447971090964.