It’s no secret that email marketing is one of the most efficient and effective forms of marketing today. No matter what blog you’ve been reading, chances are you’ve heard that you need to grow your email list.
Growing your email list is essential to bringing visitors back to your website, but what do you think the average click-through rate is on emails?
For the average business, the answer is right around 2.9%. Which, compared to other forms of online marketing is very good, but there are a few things you can do to boost your email conversions on your own.
Let’s take a look at the right way to gather email addresses, and what you can do to improve your conversions with these 6 emailing tips.
1. Gather and use real email address
Pop-ups are incredibly popular right now as a way for marketers to capture email addresses.
The average conversion rate on a pop-up is 1.66%. If your website has low to medium traffic, you should be able to get a significant increase on that number after some A/B testing.
However, pop-ups are one of those things that visitors can find very obnoxious. To make sure that you don’t annoy your audience, you need to use them the right way.
When used correctly, a pop-up shouldn’t affect your website’s bounce rate or time on page. To get the best results from your pop-up you need to do these 3 things…
1 .Understand Timing
An immediate pop-up is often a signal for a visitor to leave, it’s like an unwelcome surprise. If you are going to display a pop-up based on the time on page you should display it 10 seconds after the page loads for the best results.
That said, test what works best for site. Ten seconds is just a good starting point.
The other option is to set up exit-intent technology, which displays your pop-up as a visitor goes to exit your website. This option can be just as effective, and far less annoying.
2. Don’t Show It Every Time
Pop-up forms are not something you want to display every time a page loads on your website.
Most pop-up technology will let you set a date range that indicates when a pop-up should display again after being closed or filled out. A safe bet is once your pop-up has been closed to not show it to that visitor again for 7 days. However, if you want to be more aggressive with your email collection, you can display it again after 4 days.
3. Make It Easy to Close
Nothing screams virus like a pop-up with no exit or close button. Make sure it is very clear how to close the pop-up.
An alternative method to email collection
The far less annoying cousin to the pop-up is a slide in form, which sits on the side of your page.
These still give you a chance to display your offer, but doesn’t take over the webpage. You still want to make sure it is easy to close, but you can display it far more often, and for longer, than you would a pop-up. Adding a slide-in to your blog posts is a good place to start. A good rule of thumb is to display your slide-in offer after a visitor has scrolled through 25% of your content, but again, test it for your audience.
You should note that you may want to disable this feature on mobile, as it can cause display issues for many users.
Remember, where you ask for emails is just as important as how you ask for them. These are the best places to ask your email addresses on your website.
1. Home page
It’s very easy to create a “feature box” allowing visitors to opt-in.
2. Blog posts
Placing an offer within content, positioned as an expanded content offer, has an excellent conversion rate.
3. About page
While it may seem slightly illogical, your site analytics will most likely tell you that your About page gets a significant amount of traffic. This makes it a great place to ask for emails.
2. start Segmentation
One key to successful email marketing is relevancy, and nothing boosts relevancy like segmentation. By segmenting your email list, you can respond to subscriber behaviors and provide them with the right message.
Here are some ways to get started with segmentation today.
1. Use buying cycle differentiators
You may have the email addresses of potential customers, sale qualified leads, and current customers, but that doesn’t mean they all want the same email content. You should create separate email lists for each stage of the buying cycle to help nurture them through the sales funnel.
2. Purchase history
Depending on what products, services, or forms a visitor has filled out, you can supply them with a follow-up “suggestion” email that includes an upgrade or another offer. Remember, the better segmented your list is, the more relevant your follow-up can be.
The best example of this type is segmentation is Amazon. After you buy something on Amazon, you’ll start getting emails saying “We Think You Might Be Interested In…” or “Review Your Recent Purchase”.
3. Geographic location
If your company operates and services people across the US, the needs of those in California are probably going to be different than those in Ohio, especially when you take into account the time of year.
How to Personalize your segmented emails
When sending emails to a segmented list, use the information you’ve already collected to make the emails more personalized to boost conversation.
For example, here’s what you should be able to do with this information…
1. Optimize the subject line and headlines with useful and specific information.
2. Personalize by adding the recipient’s first name.
3. Create a customized message directed at the recipient.
3. email types you can utilize
You can create plenty of different kinds of email. However, emails will typically fall into one of 3 types of emails. The conversation rate of your email is directly effected by the type of email you send. They are…
1. Batch emails
Otherwise known as “email blasts”. These are the emails that you send to everyone without any segmentation and usually without personalization.
If you want to increase the conversion rate on your email, avoid sending these.
2. Nurture emails
Nurture emails are primarily used to lead prospects through your sales tunnel, and progress a potential customer from one who isn’t ready to buy, to one that is.
The key to being able to send nurture emails is to collect their email address early on in the sales process. It has been documented that it take approximately 10 visits to your site before a visitor is ready to make a purchase. Each email that you send to bring a visitor back to your website, makes you one step closer to closing a sale.
As a tip, send nurture emails with relevant information or enticing offers.
3. Trigger Emails
These emails are “triggered” by a specific action a visitor takes on your website, and are usually highly personalized.
Act-on sites these examples of trigger email campaigns…
- Confirmation Messages – welcome emails to new subscribers, and thank you notes for making a purchase or taking a survey
- Event Campaigns – a series of triggers that go out before and after an event or webinar; reduces non-attendance and increases opportunities for continued conversations
- Shopping Cart Abandonment – alerts to visitors who’ve left items in their shopping cart
- Personal Messages – birthdays, anniversaries, holidays
4. Be Relevant to Your Audience
The secret to increasing your email conversion rates can be summed up in one word… relevance. To determine what is relevant to your audience, do one of these 2 things…
1. Discover what your audience is interested in
If you have a lot of blog traffic this step is easy. All you have to do is look at the page views of each of your blog posts and identify a common thread between your most viewed posts. That theme is what your audience is interested in. If there isn’t a clear theme, then start building out topics around your most viewed pages to create a solid theme for your content.
If you have low blog traffic, you can do the following instead…
2. Look at what your competitors are doing
Start by identifying 5 to 10 of your top competitors, focus on those who have a blog and created content offers.
Take note of their main call to action, usually located on their home page, in the navigation, or in their blog sidebar.
Next, look for their popular posts. Check their blog to see if they have a widget that displays “Popular Posts”. If not, you can input their blog URL into BuzzSumo to see their most shared articles.
You can use the information you’ve gathered from your competitors to get a better handle on what kind of information is relevant to your audience. Now you can create a relevant primary call to action on your own site to help you collect email addresses.
When you create you call to action, keep these 3 things in mind.
1. Make it relevant.
2. Deliver high quality content.
3. Be specific.
You can’t be afraid to make your offer specific. By having a generic offer, you will actually lose interest from potential customers.
Why?
Because you won’t be creating content that is helpful. Information that is specific to a visitor’s question is what provides unique value. If you can make an offer that is specific, relevant, and is of high quality, you will enjoy much more success.
Here are a few examples of the format for your main call to action:
1. E-Book
2. Free courses
3. Lists
4. Free Trial
5. The Keys to writing killer Email Copy
Creating great headlines will get your emails opened, but writing compelling email copy will increase conversion.
In order to create compelling copy for email, follow these 3 key points…
1. Keep it short and to the point
Take a moment and think to yourself “What emails do I actually read?”
The answer probably isn’t long-winded emails with no obvious call to action. Instead, it’s probably those that tell you what’s going on in a short paragraph, and then gives you a next step. Constant Contact found that, in general, emails with about 20 lines of text, and three or fewer images had the best click-through rate.
2. Provide an offer of value
Make sure your readers know they will get something when your email is opened. This is partially done in the headline by validating that it will be worth their time to open it.
In the email body, while still being quick and to the point, tell them why they want what you have to offer. Remember to focus on the benefits, not features.
3. Include a Clear Call to Action
The call to action in your email should match your headline, a marketing technique called “message match”.
Message match is a term used frequently when talking about Ads and Landing pages, but the same logic can be applied to email headlines and calls to action.
The direct definition from Unbounce is this:
A measure of how well your landing page copy matches the phrasing of the ad or link that brought the visitor there. For PPC marketers, this means matching your ad copy to your landing page headline. Strong message match increases conversions because it reassures people they’ve come to the right place.
Much like a call to action on a website, your email call to action should stand out. Don’t make it difficult to find.
If you want to make your call to action a text link, that’s fine as well. However, you should separate it from your paragraph text to make it easier to identify.
6. A/B Testing Your Emails
Every piece of information in this post is a baseline, an average for which to start optimizing your email conversion rate. However, the only way to get peak optimization of your email conversions is to test what works for your business. To get started with A/B testing, you need to do 2 things…
1. Pick your test
In order to figure out what you should test, determine what the goal of improving your email is. Do you want to increase open rates? Test the headline. Do you want to increase conversion rates? Test the call to action.
When you pick what you want to test, whether it’s your headline, personalization, call to action text, or template design, make sure that you only test one thing at a time. Otherwise, you won’t really know what change made the difference.
2. Create a Control and Treatment
Create the “A” and “B,” if you will.
The control, or “A”, is what you would normally do. Your subject line, sender name, template, call to action, etc. should follow the same formula that you have been using.
The treatment, or “B”, will contain the one element you would like to change.
After you send the email, measure the results based on the goal of your test.
Here are 3 examples of A/B tests you can try today…
1. PS vs No PS
Including a secondary call to action in a post script (PS) can be a clever way to increase conversions. However, it can detract from your primary call to action. So, you may not want to do this test on all your emails.
The best place to test this is on nurture emails, because even if they miss your main call to action and click your secondary call to action they are still coming back to your website.
2. Time of Day & Day of the Week
This is a big one. The time of day you send your email can matter a lot. Not only the time of day, but the day of the week as well.
To illustrate why you need to test your send times, let’s take a look at some information complied by MailChimp…
While there is a peak in this graph at 10 AM, look at the percentage… It’s at 7%.
So, what does that mean?
There is no universal best time to send an email that reaches across all audiences. For the best results, start by taking into consideration the daily habits of your audience.
For instance, do you think a bartender is going to open up an email you send at 7 am? Probably not.
Next let’s look at day of the week…
While there isn’t a day that wins hands down for sending an email, there is a slight peak on Thursday. However, what you should really take away from this chart is that the weekdays are definitely better than the weekend.
Just like the rest of this information, you to find out what works best for your business, because there is no definitive answer on the best day and time.
3. First Name vs No Name
Personalization is great, but it can also freak people out. If you are not getting the results you want with your emails and you are utilizing personalization, try removing it.
Conclusion
Using any of these 6 key points to emailing can boost your conversion rates. If you only feel like getting your feet wet, start by gathering relevant email addresses using pop-ups, exit-intent technology, and slide-ins on your website.
A/B testing might be the most time consuming of these methods, but I would encourage you to try implementing all of these points.
