Conversion rate

Conversion Rate

• What It Is: The percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired action, such as filling out a lead generation form or purchasing a product.
• How to Calculate It: (Number of people who completed the desired action ÷ Number of total emails delivered) * 100
• Example: 400 people who completed the desired action ÷ 10,000 total email delivered * 100 = 4% conversion rate

After an email recipient has clicked through on your email, the next goal is typically to get them to convert on your offer — in other words, to take the action that your email has asked them to take. So if you’re sending an email to offer your audience the chance to download, say, a free ebook, you’d consider anyone who actually downloads that ebook to be a conversion.

Because your definition of a conversion is directly tied to the call-to-action in your email, and your call-to-action should be directly tied to the overall goal of your email marketing, conversion rate is one of the most important metrics for determining the extent to which you’re achieving your goals. (We’ll discuss more specific goal-related metrics later.)

In order to measure conversion rate on your emails, you’ll need to integrate your email platform and your web analytics. You can do this by creating unique tracking URLs for your email links that identify the source of the click as coming from a specific email campaign.

How valuable is your conversion rate?

If your goal is to generate leads, conversion rates are incredibly important as they show you how successful your newsletters are at actually generating prospects and leads.