Email Marketing Insider: Conversion Rate

What counts as conversion in an email marketing campaign?

Before you decide how to optimize your landing page to increase conversion, you need to define what counts as conversion

While we all like to sell, it is not the only measure of conversion. Here are a few other metrics that can count as conversion depending on your campaign:

The most obvious measure of conversion is when the user makes a purchase on your website.
If email campaign was sent to a third party database, the most important thing is to get the users to register on your database (e.g. to subscribe to your newsletter). This way you will get to email those people for free the next time you have an offer.
In a B2B sales environment, usually sales only takes place after a conversation between the client and the sales team. In these cases, any replies, calls or online chats initiated from the email campaign should count as conversion.
The most successful campaigns, are those which become viral i.e. get forwarded around social and professional networks and generate free additional traffic. If that is what you aim for, you should count likes, shares, and forwards as conversion.
Selling is usually easier when the user has had previous encounters with your website and offerings. So every visit to your website and every additional page viewed during that visit, contributes to future sales and can count as conversion for your campaign.

Here is an interesting article about What Counts as Conversion?

How to optimize your landing page

The last step in an email marketing campaign is to optimize your landing page. You have come a long journey to improve your delivery rate, open rate and click-through rate. At this stage, the user has landed on your website and is engaged with your offer. Here are a few tips on how you can take advantage of this by optimizing your landing page:

Landing Page Content:

Have a clear headline that relates to the email campaign. Don’t confuse the user with a landing page which is not relevant to the email.
Provide something valuable that the email didn’t provide. Do not repeat what was already mentioned in the email.
Provide incentives and reasons why they should follow your call to action.
Personalize content to suit different interests. Don’t use the same landing page for all customers.
Add social sharing buttons for users to share, like and forward your page to their network.

Landing Page Call-to-Action

Your call-to-action should be very simple, clear and visible in the first scroll of the page.
Only offer one action. Don’t distract the user with multiple options.
Make it easy for users to action e.g. by making your registration process short and simple.

Look and Feel of the Landing Page

The users prefer to see a familiar look. So use your corporate colors and logo. Don’t create a landing page which is completely different to the rest of your website.
Avoid using your standard navigation bars as it can distract the user from your main call to action.
Make your page simple and easy to read. Avoid having too much text or too many images. The users should be able to decide whether they are interested in what you offer in a few seconds.
Make sure your page loads fast. Users get bored and lose interest if they have to wait more than 5 seconds for the page to load.
Impress the user with the design of your page.

Testing Your Landing Page

As always test different versions of your landing page with small portions of your mailing list before sending to everyone.
If users landed on your website but didn’t convert, try calling a few recipients and ask them what they thought about the offer. Try to understand what went wrong and learn from it.

Here’s a few interesting articles about how to increase your conversion rate: