It’s time to talk about conversion rates.

Everyone wants better open and click-through rates. But are you losing sight of the forest for the trees?

Because if you’re getting a ton of opens and clicks, but your conversion rates are stagnant, you’re in trouble. 

So, in today’s edition, we’re going to talk about simple, scientific ways to focus on the metric that matters the most to your business’s bottom line. 

What do you consider a conversion?

If you want to improve your conversion rates, it helps to know what you consider a conversion. Because a conversion doesn’t have to equal a sale. It could be a signup, a completed form, or a download. 

Once you’ve identified what constitutes a conversion, you need to figure out how much traffic it takes to get one. 

For example, if you’re trying to boost downloads of your latest white paper, you’ll need to know how many eyes you need on that offer before someone hits the download button. 

Since this newsletter focuses on your email marketing, we’ll use email as an example. 

Here’s the formula you’ll use:

Email Marketing Conversion Rate = Number of Conversions / Number of Delivered Emails ×100

You’ll notice that this rate is calculated based on the total number of delivered emails, not on the total number of emails opened or clicked on. 

So, obviously, the more opens and clicks you can get, the better your conversion rate will actually be. 

How does your conversion rate compare? 

Knowing your conversion rate is critical. But knowing how your conversion rate compares to industry averages lets you know how “good” or “bad” your campaign conversion rates are performing. 

While a lot of things can impact these numbers, there is a baseline you can use pulled from a study done by Remarkety. 

Take a look at those numbers here.

Then, once you know how you measure up, it’s time to start boosting those conversion rates. 

Here’s how you can do it. 

6 ways to boost your conversion rates

1, Put a Conversion Rate Optimization plan into play

A CRO plan isn’t a calendar, it’s more like a roadmap that allows you to get a bird’s eye view of which experiment gets launched when, the time and resources you’ll need to devote to the experiment, plus the outcome you’re aiming for. Having one allows you to use a strategic approach versus a spray and pray method. It can boost speed and efficiency and greater control over your resource allocation. You can manually build one, or you can use pre-built, customizable CRO roadmaps from companies like Hubspot. This tool can help carry you from where you are to exactly where your business wants to be.

2. Take a good, hard look at your form(s)

Whether it’s an order form or a signup form, the data says that less is more. The longer your forms are, and the more required fields you include, the higher the chances are that your form will be abandoned. The average attention span keeps on shrinking, so the more effortless you can make completing a task, the better. Take a good, hard look at your forms and see if you’re can simplify the process for the end user. If you have already whittled your form down to the bare minimum, you can also try to carry over field data from your email platform and “pre-fill” information on the lander. Remember, you can always go back and ask for more information from someone once they are in your funnel. But if they never get there in the first place, that opportunity is wasted. 

3. Add Live Chat into the mix

If someone isn’t converting into your funnel, it could just be because they have a question or concern. And thanks to that attention span scarcity we just talked about, chances are high they aren’t going to search all over your site to find a way to contact you to overcome that obstacle or objection. But if you have an instant live chat feature turned on, they just might. Thanks to artificial intelligence, this feature can be powered by robots, at least initially. And if your auto-responses don’t do the trick, this can be escalated to a live customer service representative that can get the job done. Setting up live chat is easier than ever and can be a powerful way to boost your conversions.

4. Implement split testing for continuous improvement

When it comes to your conversions, no business can afford to adopt a “Mediocrates” mindset. Split testing allows you to stop settling for good enough and always work towards delivering the best-ever results. When you’ve established your winning control, it’s time to test elements to see if you can raise the bar even higher. Could your campaign get better results if you use a different color scheme? A different font? By incorporating video? Or offering a transcript of videos for those who don’t have the time to watch right now? There are no limits to the types of A/B split tests you can launch. Make sure that each test is only testing a single element so that you can remove the guesswork about what alteration paid off. 

5. Don’t abandon people just because they abandoned your offer

If you don’t already have an abandoned cart campaign in place, what are you waiting for? Whether someone abandoned a purchase or simply opened an email and didn’t take action, sometimes the second (or third) time is the charm. Instead of pretending like the “diss” never happened, address it directly and work to overcome the objections that prevented your prospect from following through. Your abandonment campaign could offer FAQs, overcome common objections or simply offer a discount to incentivize taking action now. It’s obvious that you’ve already piqued their interest. This is your opportunity to seal the deal. Otherwise, you’re just leaving money on the table. 

6. Evaluate the experience from the beginning to the end

Nothing is more discouraging than having stellar open and click-through rates but abysmal conversions. This problem often stems from having great email copy but a less than impressive experience once they click over to the site or the offer. Is your copy overpromising and underdelivering? Are you taking for granted that someone who has time to read your offer also has time to sit through a one-hour or longer video presentation?  This is the time to bust out the “ideal reader avatar” we talked about last week to make sure that your messaging is really resonating with what you know about your audience. Take a deep dive into the entire funnel to find out where the disconnect is happening and what you can do to effectively bridge that gap and boost your conversions along the way. 

If your business accidentally adopted a “Mediocrates” mindset, you don’t have to keep adopting it. These six simple strategies will help you take “good enough” and transform it into best-ever results. And then you can lather, rinse and repeat, making your best even better week after week. 

The Knowledge Base

Q: Inbox Mailers has revolutionized our open rates, but our click-through rates are still struggling. Do you have any tips on how we can boost those numbers?

A: Absolutely. It sounds to me like you might have missed our feature last week, How to make your content more clickable. Inside, we shared eight simple strategies to help you turn passive readers into actively engaged subscribers. You can check those out right here. 

Q: I heard through the grapevine that Inbox Mailers will be sponsoring the upcoming Traffic & Conversions Summit later this month. How can I find you guys there?

A: Great question. Inbox Mailers is a proud sponsor of the upcoming Traffic & Conversions Summit in San Diego on September 27-29th. We attend these events because we know that sometimes, face-to-face interactions go a long way towards answering questions, addressing concerns, and giving one-on-one opportunities to interact with and demo our solution. You can find out more about our sponsorship here, and you can find our booth at #G7 when you attend. We look forward to seeing you there. To make sure we have a chance to connect, you can reserve a slot on our calendar using this link. 

Q: How does Inbox Mailers compare to other inboxing and deliverability solutions that are out there?

A: Call me biased, but as far as I’m concerned, there is no comparison. That’s because those other solutions are just charging you to add in “seeded” emails that they promise will boost your open rates and make email providers happier. And they’ll charge you upwards of $650 for just 500 of these seeds to open your email. And that’s all they’re going to do is open. They aren’t going to convert. Why would you spend all that money when you could be using our solution instead? Take a look at the engagement lifts we can deliver and tell me if you really think that’s an apples-to-apples comparison. 

Survey Says

It looks like last week’s feature and survey on scrubbing your lists hit a nerve. While many of you clicked to learn more about how and why you should be cleaning your list, not a single person was willing to embrace transparency and admit the last time you cleaned your list. 

So, we can summarize those survey results with this:

That leads me to believe that it’s been a very long time since most of you performed a comprehensive list scrub. If you’re guilty as charged, here’s a chance to revisit our recommendation on how and why you need to scrub your email marketing lists. 

You can also be courageous and weigh in now that you can rest assured that you aren’t alone in letting this task get pushed off to the back burner for far too long. 

Now, here’s this week’s survey:

Iron sharpens iron, so let our readers know how your team is (or isn’t) handling split testing in your email marketing department. 

Facts & Stats

• Did you know that email marketing is 40% better at converting than Facebook or Twitter?
• Businesses are using email marketing primarily for lead generation (85%), sales (84%), lead nurturing (78%), and customer retention (74%)
• Did you know that triggered emails result in 8 times more opens and greater earnings than typical bulk emails?

Today’s Hack

Today’s edition has been all about boosting conversions. While we’ve already shared six powerful ways to lift your conversion rates, there’s another incredible way to boost conversion with little effort: adding social proof to your site and communications. Here are 42 reasons your business needs social proof and the best way to share that proof with your readers and visitors.