To really understand your email list and how to measure its ROI, we need to look at the number of how many is DELIVERED and opened.
Yes, we want click-through rates, but to increase the click through rates, we need to improve the number of successfully delivered emails. Click through rates means the number of people who opened and clicked on a link(s) within an email.
First let’s take a look at how to calculate your email conversion rate:
(Number of people who completed the desired action ÷ Number of total successfully emails delivered) x 100.
For example: 400 people completed the desired action ÷ 10,000 total e-mails delivered
x 100 = 4% conversion rate.
The basis of this topic is e-mail newsletter: Let’s make some assumptions here. In the newsletter there are a couple of call to actions in it, one is to sign up for a course and the other is to purchase a book.
Take a look at your recent newsletter delivery – to calculate this: let’s say you have a list of 5000 subscribers. You sent out an email newsletter. How many bounces did you get? Take that out. How many unsubscribes did you get? Take that out.
Your actual email delivered has now changed from 5000 down to whatever the total count is after taking out the bounces and unsubscribes. How many people completed the desired action?
The desired action can be anything – product purchased, an e-book downloaded or even directing a subscriber to a social channel. In this case – it was to sign up for a course and to purchase a book.
Calculate your Email Conversion Rate
Now do your email conversion rate calculation. How does it look?
Industry standard rates of e-mail newsletter has an average of 23.4% open rate with a 17.8% click through rate and 1% conversion rate.
Let’s address the number of successfully delivered emails. We call that “email deliverability”. That means the rate of emails delivered to your subscribers or customers’ inbox. To successfully drive a successful email campaign or newsletters, it is important for you to know that your content is reaching your audience.
If you are getting high number of bounces and unsubscribes, there are several things to look at. In terms of industry standard, anything higher than 10% bounce rate needs to be looked at. The average unsubscribe rate is between 0.2% and 0.5%. High unsubscribe rate can mean a variety of things from poorly optimized content to bad email addresses.
Let’s take a look at how to improve your email deliverability.
Five tips to improve your email deliverability:
- Create mobile optimized emails – more than 55% of emails are opened on mobile devices. Emails that do not display correctly could end up deleted or unsubscribed.
- Carefully segment your list – when it comes to boosting your conversion rate, segment your email list. This is applicable if you have a large subscriber list – well over 5K.
- Customize the subject line, sender name and deliver great content – The sender name is usually the first thing that recipients notice when they receive an email. For that reason, the name under which you send your emails should be clear and recognizable. Ideally it should also be personal, rather than a generic company email address. Your subject line is just as important as your sender name.
- Automate your campaign and use behavioral triggers – there are many strategies and tools that you can use to automate your campaigns to respond to particular subscriber actions. Behavior triggered emails are sent in response to an action taken by a subscriber. They consistently drive better conversion rates because of the immediacy they create when users get a response based on something they did.
- Engage with your content – If your email sounds generic and lacks personality, chances are nobody will read them. To make your emails engaging, make sure you’re using your “brand voice”– whatever that may be.
Lastly – remove those bounces, unengaged and unsubscribed every year. Keeping them on your list slants the calculations of your metrics.
Looking for best ways to improve your email deliverability and boost the number of your emails that are opened? SCS Digital Marketing can help. E-mail at hello@scs-digitalmarketing.com.