How to Properly Define an Email Conversion
The biggest mistake that you can make when it comes to email marketing is labeling any type of click-through or email open as a conversion. However, if you actually want to figure out which email conversions lead to sales, you need to be more selective in your definition of email conversion.
To help you get better results from your email marketing efforts, we’ve put together a quick guide on how to properly define an email conversion.
Recognize Click Fraud and Bot Activity
While click fraud and bot activity are well-known problems for email marketers, they continue to skew email conversion statistics. The best way to improve your email conversion rates and identify those clicks that actually lead to sales is to recognize click fraud and bot activity and remove them from your campaign stats. The prevention should start by reviewing the methods that you use to get email subscribers in the first place.
Work with advertisers that guarantee a high level of brand safety. Stop going to cheap sources for traffic that are likely to use spam as a way to make it look like your site is getting traffic. Finally, attack poor quality backlinks to your site to stop the fake visitors from signing up for your email lists in the first place. Add additional layers of protection, such as human validation, lead quality control, and regular audits where you remove suspected offenders from your email list.
In addition, you also need to provide content that helps to build trust and respect for your brand. There are too many cases where marketers simply apply one-size-fits-all marketing to all of their customers or create emails that provide little value.
Your email marketing strategy should include much more than simply sending out an endless stream of discount offers or links to your blog posts. By creating content that should lead to engagement or conversions only from specific users, it will be easier to identify false conversions.
Figure Out Your Campaign Goals
Depending on your goals for your email marketing campaign, any of the following might be considered as a conversion:
- Email opens
- Click-throughs
- Visits to your website
- Sales
- Mobile app download
- Shares on social media
- Views on a video
- Registering for an event or webinar
- and more.
While some of these actions lead directly to a sale, other actions on this list simply show that the user is somewhat interested in your brand. As a result, you should rank each of these user actions to determine which of these you should really consider as a conversion based on your campaign goals. Redefine the actions that aren’t essential to meeting your campaign goals as simple engagement.
Don’t Make Assumptions About Your Sales Funnel
You should be aware of the fact that making assumptions about your sales funnel can make it look like you are actually winning when it comes to conversions but you are actually losing. As an example, making the assumption that the next step after a white paper download is a sales call is a mistake if there is no data to back this up.
As you develop your email campaign, you should start by simply observing how users interact with your email content and adjust your campaign goals and conversion definitions as you go along. By using data as the driver for your definition of email conversion, you can avoid deadly assumptions that will destroy your campaign’s ROI.
How do you define email conversions? Tell us more about your email marketing strategy in the comments. If you need professional email marketing services, contact Infintech Designs now.
