Email has been around since the 1970s, and even though it’s now ubiquitous, you might still be surprised to learn just how effective a marketing tool it is today.
Even though it’s a 50-year-old technology, businesses are still using email to connect with followers, turn leads into customers, and engage audiences with news, promotions, information, and special deals.
There are many ways that email marketing can help grow your business, and one of the most important is that it allows you to reach out to people who have visited your site without converting, meaning you can target qualified leads through email to get a second chance at a conversion.
However, to nurture a lead like this, it’s integral that you personalize and customize your communications, use the right types of emails at the right time, and use promotional emails strategically to avoid overwhelming leads that haven’t been fully cultivated.
When using email marketing, sale conversion is always the goal. To help you reach that goal, this article will show you how to do email marketing the right way.
- How can Email Marketing be More Effective?
- How do You Measure Effectiveness of Email Marketing?
- What is a Good Email Marketing Conversion Rate?
- How do I Write a High Conversion Email?
- Which is the Best Emails Marketing Tool?
How can Email Marketing be More Effective?
With the advent of marketing technology tools for emailing (e.g., Silverpop, Eloqua, Act-On), marketers can send as many emails as frequently as they want.
Read Also: How To Earn Money Online With Email List Marketing
And why not, if the premise is that increasing email activity will improve prospect conversion odds, and the cost of sending another email is zero?
But the reality is that relevant engagement happens when a personalized message or content is provided to a tightly defined segment. When too many emails are sent, and there’s no consideration of persona, buying cycle or need, the relationship with the prospect is weakened.
The result is that prospects and customers stop listening. When the listening and engaging stops, marketing’s effectiveness is shattered.
Below, you will find six keys for leveraging technology and data that, when coupled with high-quality content, will ensure your email marketing efforts drive revenue.
1. Create strong content
Focus on creating and sending high-quality (personalized) emails versus many general emails that don’t provide value. Creating personalized emails for tightly defined segments takes time and money. But the results speak for themselves.
Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14 percent and conversions by 10 percent.
2. Determine optimal email frequency
This is not a one-size-fits-all number. Segment your database based on email engagement (highly engaged, limited engagement, no engagement).
Test to understand what is optimal for each group, and define a threshold of emails that ensures engagement but leaves no money on the table.
Monitor the number of emails sent at the prospect level. If the threshold is met (on a daily, weekly or monthly basis) stop sending more emails to that prospect.
Kerry Reilly, the director of product marketing for Adobe Campaign, says marketers must minimize email blasting and wide sweeping messages. Instead, they must maximize contextual engagement in every message by leveraging their data in smart ways.
An Adobe case study found that by decreasing total emails sent by 16 percent (and including more relevant content), they realized a 60-percent improvement in open rates.
3. Prioritize communication
Determine which emails are most important while suppressing those of less significance. This is a matrix decision based on buying cycle, focus of emails and the business unit that owns the email.
Maintain open and fluid communications within the entire marketing organization. This can be tricky when disparate teams are involved.
Jon Russo of B2B Fusion has seen significant improvement in marketing effectiveness when all marketing teams within an organization share campaign communication information.
“We’ve enabled enterprises to cut their email volume by over 59 percent and improve email engagement by 12 percent by actively managing the email process,” he told me. “These aggressive steps are fundamental to help improve revenue conversion.”
4. Standardize data for segmentation
Use picklists or lookup tables instead of free-form text for fields to help you better personalize communication. For example, instead of a title field, use job function.
Map existing values to the standardized fields. Create processes to populate the non-standard values in the standardized fields or begin using the standardized fields in your data capture efforts (e.g., form submits, file uploads).
5. Ensure key data for segmentation is available
Clean and accurate data is needed for the segmentation that drives personalized emails. For example, industry or job function might be fields in your segmentation strategy that are the basis for your communication.
If these fields are empty or have out-of-date information, refresh your data through a third-party service. Then, once the data is clean, you can segment and kick off your campaign.
6. Measure results and optimize tactics
As modern marketers, we rely heavily on metrics to validate our results and report up to the C-suite. Couple these metrics with lower-level tracking to monitor the effectiveness of campaigns and contact engagement.
Analyze lead scores for campaigns and specific segments to understand how effective the marketing effort is. Low overall engagement lead scores indicate there’s an issue, while high (on average) lead scores show the marketing organization is effective.
With so much on a marketer’s plate — from revenue generation to brand awareness and the overall customer experience — every effort needs to produce maximum results.
And given that email is one of the most powerful ways for marketers to communicate, there’s no room for suboptimal results.
How do You Measure Effectiveness of Email Marketing?
Once an email is sent, marketers are left with an abundance of campaign reports. But what are marketers to do with the data?
Avinash Kaushik, the world’s leading web analyst recommends spending 10% of reporting and 90% of actions based on the data. And according to Marketingsherpa, the top email marketing KPI’s are open rate, click through rate and delivery rate
Let’s take a look at the top three email marketing metrics.
1. Delivery rates
This metric is the main starting point of your email campaign and is a great metric to monitor the strength of your email list. A high deliverable rate means you ARE reaching your intended audience. A low delivery rate means you need to work on building a healthy subscription list.
Tip: An easy way to increase the size of your lists is to place your email sign up on the front page of your website. If you’re looking to improve the health of it, then implement double opt-in.
2. Open rates
Once your email has reached your clients inbox, the next challenge is to get the email read.
Your subject line will have the biggest impact on your campaign and is what gets the subscriber to click “open”.
It needs to catch the reader’s attention and should be relevant to the user to describe what the reader can expect when reading the entire email.
One way to stand out from the competition is to use a person’s name to send an email campaign, rather than using your company name. A B2B email marketing report found that 89% of B2B email campaigns are sent from a company name.
Tip: Research by Implix found that subject lines with more than 25 characters are more likely to be read than subject lines with less than 25 characters.
3. Click through rates
Now that your subscriber has received the email and opened it, it’s time for action. This is solely down to your content – Is your content relevant? Relevant emails will have high click through rates.
If your email campaign approach is to send one email to all subscribers your click through rates will be poor.
Tip: To achieve high click through rates, segment your lists by topics of interest. It may result in sending more email campaigns per month, but it will bring more visitors to your website and result in fewer subscribers clicking the unsubscribe button.
What is a Good Email Marketing Conversion Rate?
As email marketers, it’s important to know how your email marketing results compare to your competitors and other businesses in your industry. This will help you determine, for instance, what kind of open rates or conversion rates businesses like yours should expect. The more you know, the better.
How to Calculate your Email Conversion Rate
Before you begin benchmarking data and statistics, you need to comprehensively understand your email conversion rate (ECR) and the metrics supporting it.
Conversion rate refers to the percentage of subscribers who either complete the desired action or become customers, depending on your conversion goal.
To compute your conversion rate, divide the number of signups or purchases by the total number of successful email deliveries. Then, multiply it by 100.
Conversion Rate (%) = # of signups or purchases / # of Successfully Delivered Emails X 100
Once you know your conversion rate, you can now compare it with industry standards. If it’s below average, then you can implement various conversion rate optimization techniques.
Continue to calculate your conversion rates as you try each new technique to determine which ones are working best.
To get the average industry standards, Mailchimp tracked email campaigns with at least 1,000 recipients and scanned over hundreds of millions of emails delivered through their systems.
| Industry | Open Rate | Click-Through Rate |
| Agriculture and Food | 24.71% | 2.98% |
| Architecture | 24.78% | 2.90% |
| Arts and Artists | 27.23% | 2.85% |
| Beauty and Personal Care | 18.48% | 1.96% |
| Business and Finance | 20.97% | 2.73% |
| Computers and Electronics | 20.87% | 2.16% |
| Construction | 22.10% | 1.95% |
| Consulting | 19.54% | 2.26% |
| Creative Services / Agency | 22.41% | 2.61% |
| Daily Deals / E-coupons | 15.22% | 2.39% |
| E-commerce | 16.75% | 2.32% |
| Education and Training | 22.00% | 2.63% |
| Entertainment and Events | 21.21% | 2.33% |
| Gambling | 18.75% | 3.35% |
| Games | 20.82% | 3.33% |
| Government | 26.33% | 3.62% |
| Health and Fitness | 21.93% | 2.57% |
| Hobbies | 28.46% | 5.13% |
| Home and Garden | 23.82% | 3.47% |
| Insurance | 21.56% | 2.11% |
| Legal | 22.49% | 2.99% |
| Manufacturing | 21.74% | 2.33% |
| Marketing and Advertising | 17.81% | 1.92% |
| Media and Publishing | 22.14% | 4.70% |
| Medical, Dental, and Healthcare | 22.43% | 2.42% |
| Mobile | 19.43% | 2.10% |
| Music and Musicians | 22.86% | 2.84% |
| Non-Profit | 24.98% | 2.76% |
| Other | 23.06% | 2.81% |
| Pharmaceuticals | 20.02% | 2.51% |
| Photo and Video | 25.36% | 3.49% |
| Politics | 22.23% | 2.17% |
| Professional Services | 20.89% | 2.47% |
| Public Relations | 20.12% | 1.64% |
| Real Estate | 20.84% | 1.91% |
| Recruitment and Staffing | 20.73% | 2.18% |
| Religion | 26.46% | 3.11% |
| Restaurant | 21.17% | 1.25% |
| Restaurant and Venue | 21.71% | 1.33% |
| Retail | 20.96% | 2.50% |
| Social Networks and Online Communities | 21.71% | 3.33% |
| Software and Web App | 20.95% | 2.29% |
| Sports | 25.41% | 3.19% |
| Telecommunications | 21.57% | 2.43% |
| Travel and Transportation | 20.69% | 2.17% |
| Vitamin Supplements | 17.26% | 1.80% |
| AVERAGE | 21.80% | 2.78% |
Based on the data presented by MailChimp, the average open rate across all industries is at 21.80%, and the average click-through rate is 2.78%.
However, email marketers need to know the average open and click-through rates for their specific industry instead of basing it on the overall average rates because it varies per industry.
For instance, the arts and artists, government, architecture, agriculture and food, and non-profit industries demonstrate an above-average open rate. On the other hand, the media and publishing, government, photo, and video have exemplary click-through rates.
Remarkety studied the metrics of email campaigns of a wide range of e-commerce businesses under their platform.
Here are the open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates you can expect depending on the type of email you’re sending.
Note that this particular study defined conversion rate as the percentage of how many people place an order within three days of opening or clicking an email.
| Email Type | Open Rate | Click-Through Rate | Conversion Rate |
| Newsletter | 23.4% | 17.8% | 1% |
| Order Follow-Up | 46.1% | 16.7% | 5% |
| Inactive Customers | 38.9% | 19.5% | 2.6% |
| Abandoned Cart | 46.6% | 28.7% | 5% |
| Member Follow-Up | 39.2% | 22.4% | 2.7% |
- Newsletter
Remarkety analyzed newsletters such as email blasts sent to entire contact lists and segmented lists. They found that the average open rate is at 23.4%, while the average click-through rate is at 17.8%.
Email newsletters take a long time to create between crafting the email copy and designing the newsletter. But, the study also revealed that out of 100 email newsletters sent, only one converts into a purchase.
- Order Follow-Up
When a buyer purchases something from your company, you can expect them to be more receptive to order follow-up emails such as feedback campaigns, order replenishment campaigns, review requests and reward campaigns. In fact, almost half (46.1%) of email recipients open emails that are related to their purchase.
The average click-through rate is slightly lower than regular newsletters (16.7%), but the conversion rate is much higher at 5%. Once people order from you, they’re more likely to purchase again.
- Inactive Customers
Some customers or subscribers can forget about your brand after reading an email they didn’t find interesting. It could also simply be because they became preoccupied with their personal and professional lives. As such, they haven’t been opening, clicking through your emails, or making purchases.
The findings of the study prove that you can win back these inactive customers by sending them emails that will encourage another purchase. Surprisingly, the open rate for inactive customer emails is at 38.9%, and the click-through rate is at 19.5%—higher than newsletters or order follow-up emails.
The average conversion rate for inactive customer emails is also higher than newsletters at 2.6%, which means that it’s a good idea to invest in winning back inactive customers by sending them coupons or special discounts and other deals.
- Abandoned Cart
An abandoned shopping cart is a lost opportunity. Thankfully, you can bring them back to your website through shopping cart abandonment emails.
The average open rates for shopping cart abandonment is 46.6%—even higher than order follow-up email standards. Click-through rate is at an impressive 28.7%, and conversion rate is at 5%.
- Member Follow-Up
New user registration emails, welcome email series, and member follow-up emails perform well too. Its open rate averages at 39.2%, while click-through rate is at 22.4%.
Meanwhile, conversion rates are slightly higher than inactive customer emails (2.7%), which means you have a decent chance of making a sale from a simple welcome series.
The mere fact that a user signs up to your newsletter means that they already consider you an industry thought leader.
When you set a goal for your email marketing campaign, you need to base it on industry standards. If you’re getting higher than the industry standards provided above, then you and your team are implementing email marketing well.
Not to say that you can’t still improve, but it’s always nice to know that you’re a step ahead of the competition.
Another effective strategy is to make sure that you’re sending from a real person’s email address (name@company.com) instead of a noreply@company.com email. Your recipients need to know that a professional from your organization is sending them.
Verify and clean up your email list to increase your delivery rate and segment your list carefully.
Make sure to craft a compelling subject line and personalize your content by highlighting your value offer creatively—making it difficult for your customers to pass up your email.
How do I Write a High Conversion Email?
1. Write an Appealing Subject Line
If you’re wondering how to do email marketing right, the best place to start is with the email subject line. Perfecting the subject line can be the difference between recipients opening your email, deleting it or, even worse, reporting it as spam.
People open your emails if they feel they will benefit, if they’re worried about missing out, or if you present compelling evidence about why they should.
2. Know Your Audience
Getting to know your audience so you can write email marketing copy that meets their needs is a great way to boost conversions.
Use what you know from web and social analytics and interactions with customers to build your buyer personas or customer avatars. When you know your customers, it’s easy to write email marketing copy that makes them want to click.
3. Write for the Web
Writing email marketing copy is similar to writing web copy. That means it’s important to:
- Follow a logical structure.
- Keep paragraphs short.
- Include one main idea per paragraph.
Feel free to use bullets and subheadings to break up blocks of text and make your emails scannable.
4. Write Email Marketing Copy for Readers
If you really want readers to click, then you have to sound like a real person. Avoid marketing speak and be conversational, as if you’re talking to someone who’s sitting across the table from you.
The email below from Carbon Based Podcast is a good example.
Don’t be boring – there’s no rule that says that emails from a business have to be dry. Use your emails to stir readers’ imagination by sharing an insider’s view of your company, customer stories or even a personal anecdote.
When your subscribers can imagine themselves in your shoes, you’ll start to build a relationship with them.
5. Choose the Right Words
When you look at the best email copy examples, one thing stands out. Word choice is crucial to make reading your email a great experience, and since most emails are short, every word counts.
If you want to stir readers’ imagination, appeal to their emotions and get them to take action, you’ve got to:
- Use analogies and other literary techniques.
- Seed your email marketing copy with sensory words to help them see and feel the picture you’re painting with your words. In an ideal world, you’ll evoke touch and taste, too.
- Stir up your readers and convey action by using power words in your subject line, copy and call to action (CTA).
What you don’t say is also important for building trust. Avoid making false promises and other sleazy marketing tactics, or you risk losing subscribers forever.
6. Use Psychology in Email Marketing Strategy
As human beings, our brains are wired to react in predictable ways to certain types of input. That’s why using psychology can help you create more successful, high-converting email marketing copy.
Some of the factors that make readers read and click include:
- Fear of missing out (FOMO), because we never want to lose anything. That’s why time-limited discounts work so well. Use scarcity and urgency in your email and more people will click. That applies to curiosity, too.
- Color choice, since different colors elicit different reactions. You can use this effectively in CTA buttons, for example.
- Pictures of faces can elicit the emotions shown on those faces or direct the gaze towards a CTA.
- Social proof tells readers that people like them think you’re great, which makes them more inclined to read your emails.
- There’s also personalization, which we’ll look at in tip #11.
7. Be Relevant
Avoid generic marketing in favor of targeted marketing. Customer avatars give you broad segments you can focus on in copywriting, but within those, there are also smaller segments.
After all, you’re not going to send the same email to a new subscriber as to a repeat customer, are you?
Sending relevant email improves open and clickthrough rates, so segmentation is essential. Read this pro tips on email list segmentation to help with this.
8. Know Your Goal
Still on the subject of targeting, it’s best practice to have a single goal – the one thing you want to achieve – for each email. This will help you focus your marketing copy, which we’ll talk about more in the next tip.
Remember, if you have multiple goals you don’t really have a goal, so when planning your emails focus on the key action you want readers to take and build your email copy around that.
Not every email needs to have the goal of selling something. Pro copywriter Barry Feldman says: “Where a web page is the terrain, the copywriter’s the tour guide, instructor, concierge, maître d’, and of course, sales clerk. If the copy can’t seal the deal, it must offer something compelling to start some sort of relationship.”
9. Get Personal with Your Email Marketing Campaign
Read any advice on writing email marketing copy that works, and it’ll include a tip about personalization. It’s true that using people’s names in subject lines and email marketing copy gets their attention, but there’s more to personalization than that.
We talked earlier about segmentation. Well, that affects personalization, too, because each segment is looking for something different from your emails.
You can send different emails depending on the age, gender, and location of your audience, whether they are looking for a personal or business purchase, etc.
10. Let Readers Get to Know You
Another aspect of personalization is letting subscribers know who you are. Most people like getting emails where they can see a picture of the sender and where there’s a personal rather than generic sender, as in the emails shown below.
When you take this approach, it’ll help subscribers form a connection with you, which is the first step in winning conversions.
By the way, you can also personalize your optin forms with OptinMonster’s Smart Tags feature.
Which is the Best Emails Marketing Tool?
HubSpot, probably best known for their marketing automation platform, recently launched a free email marketing tool that can support a lot of a small business’ transactional email needs.
Whether you need to send kickback emails from lead offers, thank you emails after purchase, or just promote current campaigns, HubSpot Email Marketing’s free version can do that.
One of the best parts of HubSpot’s free email tool is its ease of use. The tool features a handy drag-and-drop visual editor, and it also comes equipped with ready-made templates to get you up and running immediately.
What makes HubSpot Email Marketing stand out is, of course, its native integration with other HubSpot tools, such as the free-forever CRM.
Once you start an account, you get access to both tools so you can create a centralized contacts database, organize it in lists, and manage and track email performance
2. Omnisend
Omnisend is a sophisticated ecommerce marketing platform that integrates all your communication platforms in one place.
Its free plan includes only email, but it’s more than enough to support the email marketing efforts of small and medium businesses.
It allows you to automate your email delivery using behavioral triggers and easily time your communications based on your customers’ convenience.
You can utilize its comprehensive audience insights to send out more relevant email marketing messages. Design attractive newsletters using time-saving features like the Product Picker, which lets you select all the products you want to include in your email.
You can also include scratch cards, discount coupon codes and gift boxes to further optimize your email performance.
3. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a leader in email marketing tools that you’ve probably heard of. Their free plan provides you with basic email marketing features such as email creation and scheduling.
What makes this a great email marketing tool is its smart recommendations feature, which provides you with valuable audience insights to optimize your marketing efforts.
Designing emails on the platform is easy using the Content Manager, where you can store your images and files for easy access.
Mailchimp lets you automate your emails at crucial steps of the buyer journey, so you can easily send out welcome emails, order confirmations, abandoned cart reminders and more.
4. MailerLite
Sophisticated features like the landing page builder and the pop-up customizer make MailerLite stand out among free email tools in the market.
In addition to the basics like the drag-and-drop email builder, the tool comes with a rich text editor and a built-in photo editor to create stunning emails.
You can create responsive landing pages to match the emails that you send, which will improve your chances of driving conversions. You can run split tests on different variations of your email to see what works best to drive clicks and conversions.
MailerLite also provides you with a comprehensive campaign report that contains important stats like click rate, unsubscribe rate, open rate and more.
5. Moosend
Moosend is an excellent email marketing tool that lets you automate repetitive tasks and saves you time. You can design behavioral email campaigns based on your subscribers’ information and/or activities.
Read Also: Quick Tips On How To Get Paid To Read Emails
You can use its advanced segmentation feature to send highly accurate emails to each recipient, increasing open rate and click-through rate as well as ROI.
This tool provides you with a detailed campaign performance report so you know exactly how to optimize your campaigns and get even better results.
You can even integrate it with some of your favorite apps to seamlessly pass on vital information between different tools. It’s also one of the only free email marketing tools that won’t include its logo in your emails.
Most of these free email marketing tools come with robust features even without the need to upgrade to a paid plan. Small businesses and marketers should be able to make the most of them while saving time and money.
Even if you need to upgrade to accommodate your business needs, you’ll find that many of the paid plans are affordable and flexible enough to fit your budget.
Conclusion
Although email has been around for several decades, it’s still an effective digital marketing tool that all businesses can benefit from.
Email can put you back in touch with the visitors who have been to your website but who left without converting, and this gives you a unique opportunity to remarket to pre-qualified leads that you know are interested in what you have to offer.
Email is also highly effective because it can be personalized and customized to individual people and specific segments.
The high delivery rate also means that email is a reliable form of marketing, and you can also keep a close eye on which recipients open, click through, convert, or unsubscribe.
The key with email marketing is to take it slow, and to start your campaign with highly educational emails that provide prospects with information about a problem or challenge they’re facing, and to work your way toward the promotional emails that are designed to convert
