Boosting opens, clicks, traffic, and page views is all well and good. But what about converting these metrics into actual paying customers? Conversions are one of the most important KPIs for any marketing team. Yet only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. At every step of the buying journey there are opportunities for marketers to increase their conversions. But how can they go about achieving this without wasting time randomly changing, tweaking, and amending their marketing campaigns? Don’t worry, conversion rate optimisation is here to help.

What is conversion rate optimisation?

Conversion rate optimisation, also called CRO, is the process of improving your marketing activity to increase conversions. Conversions can happen at various stages of the buying journey. From opening an email, to viewing pricing pages, through to specific blogs and landing pages. The goal for any business should be to design marketing campaigns, journeys and activity that converts visitors into customers. By optimising your marketing conversion rates, you can increase the amount of highly qualified leads, boost revenue, decrease costs, and generate more value from your current activity.

What are the key elements of CRO for Email Marketing?

CRO can become extremely comprehensive and sometimes complicated. Businesses can use in-depth data to analyse results, they can continuously test, tweak and amend content and copy, and draw multiple conclusions. Perhaps this is why around two-thirds of businesses still don’t have a structured CRO strategy in place. So let’s keep it simple to begin with by introducing 5 of the key elements for a successful CRO process.

Subject line

With 293.6 billion emails being sent and received every day, the inbox is a busy place. So ensuring that your subject line stands out from the crowd is more important than ever. To do so, you will want to get creative. Craft a subject line that piques interest and encourages the user to open. This could be through personalisation, such as first name or location. Through urgency, such as an offer or promotion. Through a question or statistic. Or you could use an emoji to give your email that extra visual boost.

Design and visuals

81% of people only skim the content they read online. Perhaps that’s why content that includes images produces a 650% higher engagement rate. Therefore, you should focus on eye catching design and visuals in as much of your marketing activity as possible. You can experiment with colour, photos, emojis, videos, GIFS, and illustration. Just bear in mind that design needs to remain consistent with your branding.  

Call to action

The average person gets distracted in 8 seconds, though just 2.8 seconds is enough to distract some people. That’s why it’s so important to tell your readers exactly what you want them to do. In as little time as possible. This can be achieved through a clear, concise call to action. This will help to add clarity to your message, and encourage the user to convert or click through to the next stage of the journey. To achieve this, your CTA needs to be bold, short, and snappy. It should be one of the most (if not the most) prominent and eye catching part of your email or landing page. If you have the ability, personalised CTAs can help increase your conversions by over 200%. So making the CTA relevant to your readers name, location, interests or demographics could make all the difference.

Personalisation

Talking about personalisation, this is a tactic you should try to utilise throughout your marketing. If you collect customer data this will enable you to send more relevant, personalised campaigns. You could target your audience based on their location, demographics, interests, and even stage in the buying cycle. If you want to start out simple, this can be as easy as including the recipient’s first name in the email subject line or body copy.

Testing

While not as exciting as campaign design and copy, testing is key when it comes to CRO. It gives marketers an opportunity to compare results and identify what works best for their audience and business. In fact, A/B testing is the most used method for improving conversions. You can test simple elements such as colour, graphics or call to action copy. If one variation is generating a significantly higher conversion rate, then you know to include this in future campaigns and content. So continue testing your emails, landing pages and content to ensure you are optimising for conversions as much as possible.

 Want to get started with CRO?

If you want to begin optimising your conversions to increase leads, increase revenue, decrease costs, and generate more value from your current activity, then get in touch with one of our experts. They’re always on hand to offer advice and support.