What Is Group Email Marketing Conversion Rate?

Email has evolved as a powerful and versatile tool for helping businesses communicate with both internal and external audiences.

On the one hand, group email and listserv can be incredibly useful for encouraging ‘two-way’ email communication - enabling easy collaboration and group discussion to keep everyone on the same page.

On the other hand, email marketing can be a powerful channel for broadcast communication, using one-way emails that are designed to raise brand awareness and promote your products and services.

High-performing email marketing campaigns don’t happen by accident. They are a result of careful planning, ongoing analysis, and optimizations based on KPI performance.

One of the most important metrics to help improve the performance of email marketing campaigns is conversion rate.

In this article, we’ll investigate conversion rate in email marketing, how its definition might differ from other online marketing campaigns you might manage, and include some useful tips for improving your email marketing conversion rate.

The difference between conversion rate in online marketing vs. email marketing

Conversion rate is a relatively simple metric, represented by a percentage:

Number of conversions completed by customers/number of ad engagements = conversion rate.

Most analytics solutions and ‘pay per click’ marketing channels calculate conversion rate by website sessions/conversions, focusing only on the traffic sent to the website.

On this basis, imagine that you’re running a Google Ads campaign. Your activity has delivered 1000 clicks to your website and led to 35 sign-ups for your email newsletter:

35 / 1000 = 0.035 (3.5%)

Easy enough, right?

Things get a little more complicated when different channels and platforms use various definitions of ‘ad engagements’ to calculate conversion rates.

Email marketing, in particular, is known for its lack of standardization about the definition of ‘conversion rate,’ with three common calculations used:

These are three very different calculations, and the definition you choose to use has huge implications for the measurement and comparison of email marketing against other channels.

For example, let’s assume 10,000 emails were successfully delivered on an email marketing campaign.

2500 opened your email, 200 people clicked through to your site, and 10 people converted.

From the three different definitions of email marketing conversion rate listed above, there would be three different metrics reported:

10 / 10000 = 0.1%
10 / 2500 = 0.4%
10 / 200 = 5.0%

While we’re not going to debate which calculation is correct, it’s important to be aware of the different definitions and calculations of email marketing conversion rate, so you’re able to measure email fairly against your other marketing channels.

If you’re measuring all other channels based on conversions/clicks, it’s only fair to measure email the same way if you’re looking at cross-channel performance.

But when you’re looking at the performance of email in isolation, it might be worth breaking it down into more focused KPI metrics, such as:

delivery rate
open rate
open to click rate
click to conversion rate

Breaking down your email KPIs more granularly gives you the best chance to make more focused optimizations to improve email marketing performance.

What is a good email conversion rate?

It’s challenging to advise on a typical conversion rate for email marketing, as it depends on a variety of factors.

First and foremost, it depends on how you’re calculating your email conversion rate.

It also depends on the nature of the conversion you’re measuring - with a conversion rate for a download of a free guide likely to be higher than an e-commerce purchase.

And even if you’re trying to identify the typical conversion rate for the same action, like an e-commerce sale, the value of your purchase can influence the rate at which your email subscribers take action. For example, you can expect a higher conversion rate for an affordable £10 purchase, compared to a higher involvement £199 purchase.

If your conversion is based on form completions, the amount of information you request in your form can also affect your overall conversion rate. A simple ‘book a callback’ form that only requests your name and telephone number is likely to have a higher conversion rate than a more complex form that requests income details and the subscriber’s full address.

If you’re looking for some benchmarks by industry in the e-commerce sector, Klaviyo has a useful breakdown of email marketing KPIs in different categories. The placed order rate (conversions vs. successful email deliveries) varies between 0.05% in the jewelry category and 0.18% in food and beverages.

Ruler Analytics also has a useful benchmarking guide that looks at post-click email marketing conversion rates for leads by industry. These rates range from 1.5% in B2B technology to 5.3% in healthcare and dental categories.

How to manage and improve your email conversion rate

Now that we’ve hopefully shed some light on email marketing conversion rate, the different ways it can be calculated, and the external factors that influence it - we can start to look at some tactics to help you improve it.

For the tips in this section, we’re going to consider email marketing conversion rate as being calculated as conversions / successful deliveries. So, our advice will involve everything from techniques to help improve email open rate to how you can optimize on-site conversions.

Maintain a healthy email list

Keeping your email list clean is crucial for maintaining a healthy conversion rate. By regularly cleaning your list and removing inactive subscribers, you can improve your email performance.

Consider implementing a policy of removing subscribers who haven’t opened or engaged with your emails in a fixed period of time—for example, in the last six months. This helps ensure that your list is filled with active, engaged subscribers who can help improve your

Ensure your email content is relevant

Making sure your content is tailored and relevant to your target audience is another technique that can help improve your email marketing conversion rate.

Segmenting your list based on criteria like interests, behavior, or demographics can help you deliver more targeted content to each group of subscribers.

With a Multiple List account on Simplelists, you can create unlimited email lists - helping you to granularly segment your audience for improved relevance and better conversion rates.

Have an engaging subject line

Your email subject line is your first opportunity to capture the attention of your audience, and it significantly impacts whether they choose to open your email.

To improve your open rates, try creating compelling subject lines that are less than 60 characters in length, using action-oriented language, and creating a sense of urgency.

Using personalization in your subject line, such as including the subscriber’s name can also help to boost open rates - and improve the likelihood of recipients clicking through and converting.

Personalize your content

Personalization goes beyond just using your subscriber’s name in the subject line.

To truly boost the relevancy of your email messages and improve your email marketing conversion rate, consider using the information you have about your subscribers in your CRM to help tailor the content in the body of your email.

For example, you might tailor the content of your email based on products or categories subscribers have shown an interest in or send tailored messages based on items they have abandoned in their cart.

Have a clear CTA in your email

Having a clear, compelling call to action (CTA) in your email is essential if you want to drive conversions from your email campaigns.

A good CTA should be clear, concise, and distinctive. It should use action-oriented language to prompt your subscribers to take the action you want them to take.

If you have multiple goals for your email, it’s possible to include a primary and secondary CTA - but it’s important not to overwhelm your subscribers with too many options, as this can be counter-intuitive and actually lead to inaction.

Optimize the page your email traffic lands on

Your email marketing conversion rate depends not only on the quality of your email but also on the effectiveness of the landing page where you send your traffic.

It’s important to make sure that your landing page follows best practice guidelines in terms of copy, layout and user experience.

Some common tips include trying to make sure the design and layout of your page match the email that users have come from to deliver a consistent experience and using persuasive, benefit-driven content that persuades your subscribers to take action.

Using social proof such as reviews, testimonials, and accreditations on your landing page can also help by providing subscribers with the peace of mind they need to convert.

Keep forms as short as you can

If you’re using email marketing for lead generation, the length of your forms can have a significant impact on your conversion rate.

While it might be tempting to collect as much information as possible from potential leads, it’s worth bearing in mind that shorter forms tend to have higher conversion rates.

Best practice advice is to focus on only collecting the most essential information on your initial landing page - with between 5 and 7 fields being identified as the best length for optimal conversion rates.

Have an easy checkout process

For e-commerce businesses, the checkout process is a critical factor for your email marketing conversion rate.

An overly complex or lengthy checkout process can lead to cart abandonment, so it’s important to streamline the process as much as possible.

Consider allowing a ‘guest checkout’ so subscribers don’t need to register for an account before converting, and where possible offer a variety of payment options. A lot of leading e-commerce businesses enable customers to use PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay alongside credit and debit cards.

Also, try to make sure there are no hidden surprises when it comes to delivery costs at checkout, as this is one of the main reasons behind cart abandonment.

Always be testing

If you’re looking to continuously improve your email marketing conversion rate, ongoing testing, analysis and optimization of your emails is crucial.

Consider using A/B testing to compare the KPI performance of different subject lines, email layouts, and CTAs. But be mindful to only test one variable at a time so you can accurately identify the impact of each change.

By having a data-driven approach to your email marketing, and refining your emails based on A/B testing results - you can steadily increase your email marketing conversion rate and drive better results from your campaigns.

Looking for an easy way to manage your group email marketing?

Email marketing can be complex. Even something as basic as calculating your email marketing conversion rate can be confusing, as there are multiple different calculation methods.

At Simplelists, our mission is to make email marketing and the management of group email easy and hassle-free.

Our intuitive and user-friendly list management software enables you to manage your subscriber lists with ease, improve the relevancy of your emails with granular segmentation, and seamlessly sync with your CRM and other business tools via Zapier.