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Everything, from statistics to real-life experiences, proves that email marketing is a highly effective marketing tool for eCommerce businesses. However, this is true only if the eCommerce business understands how to use and implement email marketing properly. For that, eCommerce marketers need to have a deep understanding of the core concepts of eCommerce email marketing.In this article, we will walk you through one of these concepts, which is “Email Conversion Rate.” We will start by explaining what the eCommerce email conversion rate is and how it can be calculated. Then, we will discuss the average eCommerce email conversion rate; and finally, we will tackle some of the best ways you can follow to enhance and optimize the email conversion rate for your eCommerce store.
Table of content:
- What is E-Commerce Email Conversion Rate?
- How To Calculate E-Commerce Email Conversion Rate?
- What Is The Average E-Commerce Email Conversion Rate?
- 10 Ways To Enhance E-Commerce Email Conversion Rate:
- Focus On Segmentation
- Use Personalization
- Spend Time On Choosing Your CTAs
- Consider Mobile Commerce
- Optimize Email Timing And Frequency
- Incorporate Social Proof
- Combine Other Smart Marketing Tactics With Your Email Marketing
- Focus On Sending The Right Type Of Email
- Conduct A/B Testing
- Get The Help Of ChatGPT
What is E-Commerce Email Conversion Rate?
Image source: enginemailer.com
The E-Commerce email conversion rate can be defined as the number (or percentage) of email recipients who completed a specific action after receiving an email from you and opening it compared to the total number of people who received your email. The E-Commerce email conversion rate is a metric that can measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. It can identify how much your campaigns are succeeding at converting email recipients into actual customers or achieving specified objectives.
Now, you might be wondering what kind of action the recipient should take to be reflected in the email conversion rate.
Well, the answer is that it depends. The kind of action that the recipient can take depends on the goals that you want to achieve. For instance, if you have an eCommerce store that sells products, the action you might want your customers to take is to make a purchase. However, if your eCommerce store is providing a service, then it would make more sense for the action to be signing up or subscribing to that service.
How To Calculate E-Commerce Email Conversion Rate?
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The E-Commerce email conversion rate can be calculated as follows:
- Divide the number of email conversions by the total number of emails delivered.
- Multiply the result you get by 100 (to get a result in percentage).
Knowing the number of conversions you are getting is not enough to determine how well your email marketing campaign is performing. You need to compare this number to something. In our case here, you need to compare it to the total number of emails you are sending.
For example, imagine that you launched an email marketing campaign today, and at the end of the day, you get 50 conversions. If this is the only piece of information you have, can you tell us if this number is good or bad?
You can’t give a solid answer unless you know the total number of emails you sent.
Let’s imagine you sent 700 emails. This would mean that out of the 700 people who received your emails, 50 of them converted.
In this case, we can calculate your conversion rate as follows:
(50/700) * 100 = 7.1% (Now, this is a percentage that we can conclude from. The conclusion here would be that your email marketing campaign is performing well).
However, if you sent 2000 emails, this would mean that out of the people who received your emails, only 50 of them converted. In this case, we can calculate your conversion rate as follows:
(50/2000) * 100 = 2.5% (The conclusion here would be that your emails probably need to be improved).
Nonetheless, if you want to be able to make more detailed conclusions, measure your performance more accurately, and hence, better optimize your email marketing campaigns, you need to consider the average eCommerce email conversion rate.
In other words, after comparing the number of conversions you get to the total number of emails you send, you need to compare the results to the average email conversion rate in the eCommerce industry, which is what we will discuss in the following point.
What Is The Average E-Commerce Email Conversion Rate?
You need to be aware of the average eCommerce email conversion rate because it can represent a performance benchmark for you. In other words, you can always measure the performance of your email marketing campaigns by comparing the dynamic conversion rate of your emails to the average email conversion rate in the eCommerce sector.
Additionally, keeping an eye on the average eCommerce email conversion rate can help you evaluate and predict your email marketing ROI. To better illustrate, if your conversion rate is significantly higher than the average, it might mean that your campaigns are generating a higher return when compared to the resources invested.
Research shows that the average email conversion rate for the eCommerce industry is 8% (Flowium, 2023).
10 Ways To Enhance E-Commerce Email Conversion Rate
Working on enhancing and optimizing the email conversion rate of your eCommerce email marketing campaigns is indispensable. Therefore, in the following points, we bring you some of the best ways you can do that.
1- Focus on Segmentation
Investing in customer segmentation and audience targeting is usually the first step in every marketing process and the foundation on which you should base every marketing strategy for your eCommerce store.
Email marketing is no exception to that. If you want to increase your email conversion rate, you should make sure that you are delivering these emails to the right audience; hence, you should always prioritize email segmentation.
Whether you want to conduct your email segmentation via demographics, psychographics, geographics, behavior, sales funnel, or something else, Converted.in has got your back. Our marketing automation tool can easily and effectively conduct all types of segmentation for you.
2- Use Personalization
By now, you are probably already seeing the word “personalization” everywhere. This is due to its extreme significance and the extraordinarily fascinating results that it yields.
Our advice to you is to work on tailoring the content of your email based on the distinct data and characteristics of each recipient. This includes personal characteristics, interests, preferences, wants, needs, browsing history, purchasing behavior, and any other additional data that you might have.
There are many ways you can use personalization in your emails to increase your eCommerce email conversion rate, such as:
- Use the recipient's name in the subject line and the email body.
- Send emails on your customers’ birthdays.
- Include personalized product recommendations.
- Send special offers based on your recipient’s location.
Converted.in can help you with that too because the tool that it offers can create, personalize, launch, and automate all your email marketing campaigns.
** Also, read this article to learn how you can skyrocket your eCommerce sales with email personalization.
3- Spend Time On Choosing Your CTAs
Source: getprospect.com
Have you ever watched “America’s Got Talent” or any other talent show? Are you familiar with the “Golden Buzzer”? When a judge gives a contestant the Golden Buzzer, the contestant automatically moves to the next stage in the competition.
Your Call-To-Action (CTA) is like that Golden Buzzer. When the email recipient clicks on the CTA, they automatically take the action that you wanted them to take.
The purpose behind this comparison is to highlight the importance of CTAs in your email. Therefore, make sure you always use relevant, clear, concise, and compelling CTAs in your emails.
4- Consider Mobile Commerce
Studies show that the market share of mobile commerce comprises 73% of total e-commerce. In other words, optimizing your emails for mobile devices is important since a significant portion of email recipients might open them on their smartphones or tablets.
Tips for doing that:
- Make sure your email design is responsive and will automatically adjust the email layout based on the type of device and size of the screen.
- Take into consideration devices with touch screens and create large and touch-friendly CTAs that can be easily tapped on.
5- Optimize Email Timing And Frequency
Identifying the right email timing and frequency is not an easy task to do, and not many eCommerce email marketers get it right. So, if you ever notice that your eCommerce email conversion rate is declining, make sure to review the timing and frequency of your emails.
However, there is no magic wand that you can use to cast a spell and find the perfect email timing and frequency. Also, the question of when you should send out emails and how often you should send them isn’t a question with one standard answer.
To get the email timing and frequency as right as possible, testing is one of your best options. Try sending your emails at different times and with different frequencies and see what works best for you. Also, consider crucial factors, such as your objectives and the different segments of recipients.
6- Incorporate Social Proof
Social proof makes email recipients trust you. It makes them feel safe while taking the action that you want them to take. In other words, Social proof is a strong psychological tactic that you can use to influence the behavior of your email recipients.
The best way to incorporate social proof within your email marketing campaigns is by using customer testimonials.
** Check out this article to learn the best 10 eCommerce customer testimonial examples that you can use in your emails to increase conversion rates.
7- Combine Other Smart Marketing Tactics With Your Email Marketing
Combining different marketing strategies is always smart. Among the smartest marketing tactics that you can use within your emails we can suggest the following:
- FOMO Marketing and Scarcity Marketing: These two marketing tactics create a sense of urgency and exclusivity that automatically persuades the email recipient to act quickly before they miss out on great opportunities.
- Loyalty Programs: Make your loyal customers feel special in the emails you are sending them by offering them exclusive deals, promotions, or early access to new products.
- Up-Selling and Cross-Selling: These are two of the most effective marketing techniques you can use in your emails. They simply involve recommending complementary products or more advanced versions of the products that email recipients have already purchased.
** Check out this article to learn how to create the best cross-selling emails for eCommerce.
8- Focus On Sending The Right Type Of Email
E-Commerce emails have many types; therefore, you should make sure that you are sending the right type of email to the right recipient. This is another thing that cannot be done without proper customer segmentation and a good amount of customer data.
If you are worried about gathering all your data in one place, don’t! The automation tool offered by Converted.in can gather all your data in one place like a hub with a 360-customer view.
9- Conduct A/B Testing
Image source: uplers.com
We’ve already mentioned the word “testing” in previous points. However, when it comes to email marketing, testing is so crucial to the point that we had to tackle it at a separate point. One of the most commonly used ways of testing in email marketing is A/B testing.
By using A/B testing, you can test two different versions of an email and identify which version has a better performance. This gives you the chance to test different elements of your email, such as subject lines, preview texts, email body, CTAs…etc.
Always remember that testing is the best way for optimizing.
10- Get The Help Of ChatGPT
If we were writing this article a year ago, then our suggested tips to optimize your eCommerce email conversion rate would probably have ended at the previous point. However, lucky for you, we are now living in the year 2023, where there is an amazing invention such as ChatGPT.
At the beginning of this article, we mentioned that ChatGPT can now be used in email marketing. So, we advise you to leverage it as much as you can in your journey of optimizing your email conversion rate.
** Check out this article to know what ChatGPT can do for your email marketing campaign.
Final Thoughts:
To sum up, the eCommerce email conversion rate is not something to be taken lightly. On the contrary, it is one of the most important metrics that will determine how well your email marketing campaigns are performing. Therefore, at the end of this article, we advise you to consider everything that we discussed and to follow all the tips that we suggested so that you can have a perfectly optimized email conversion rate for your eCommerce store.
