Decent email marketing conversion rates

Published in december, 11 of 2013



It's tough being an e-mail marketer nowadays. Ever since spam traps became the main concern of many professionals, this huge contact list that you had a year ago might have shrunk significantly. Those e-mail addresses that have not responded for more than 90 days may now be a spam trap and your reputation may be harmed. 

So, how to live, how to survive? And first of all: How to send “safe” e-mail marketing campaigns followed by decent conversion rates? Start planning how and to whom dispatch your email communications before it's too late and you get blacklisted. It will certainly take some time to grasp all but it is worth the effort. 

However, let's start from defining what actually a “conversion” means. A conversion can be anything that trigger customers interaction, such as click-through to get more information, purchases, free download, subscriptions, etc. It's has been proved that free offers are likely to have higher customer interaction than payable ones. If you are targeting correctly with an interesting and free offer you should easily get high conversion. On the other hand, payable offers are much harder to get decent results. 


What does “decent” e-mail conversion rate mean? Unfortunately, there in no clear answer as there are too many metrics that determine conversion rates, such as:

  • industry 
  • competitors
  • product
  • price
  • customers and so on

As you can see, many variables influence conversion rates. Therefore to understand why some of your customers choose to convert and some of them only increase the bounce rate, we recommend carrying out some A/B tests. Each customer is different and the only way to find out their preferences is to ask them by carrying our split testing. 

Even though, it's quite hard to assume a decent email conversion rate, most marketers agree that 1% to 5% is a good and realistic result. If your aim is to trigger a purchase, beside customer interaction, what you also need to measure is how the conversion rate influences your return on investment (ROI). For example it may be the case that one of your offer that converts at 4% perform worse and bring less revenue than an offer that converts at 2%. 

Conversion rates will give you valuable information when you compare them to your own data over time. If a particular offer does not convert the way you wish (less than 1%), you can either test it for improvements or drop it and focus on those that give you satisfactory results. Bear in mind that even a low conversion rate can be profitable and vice versa, so all you ought to remember is not to only look at the numbers but also at the ROI of your campaigns. 

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