We get this question a lot: “why are my emails getting low conversion rates?”

Well, it could be your copy is bad or the offer is bad but a lot of times it is more simple than that. Low conversion rates are likely being caused by your bloated recipient list, something marketing operations has full control over.

Your list may include:

• Bad and old data
• Cold prospects
• Inaccurate segmentations

All things that bloat the list size and destroy your conversion metrics.

So do yourself a favor, be more critical of who you are sending to and throw away the idea that bigger lists equals bigger results.

AND tune into this episode of fwd: thinking where we go in depth on impactful ways you can improve email conversion rates and implement them right away.

Transcription

Crissy:

Okay. Today's episode of fwd, we're covering a super important topic. It's in response to a question that we get pretty much ... like, once a week?  

Crissy:

Or at least something in relation to it. It's: how do I improve my email conversion rates? There are loads of things that can go into this. But the first thing we always think about is: how do I make my content more engaging, or are there any words I'm using that might be hitting the spam traps? But we focus on the email itself, the template, the look of it, everything.  

Crissy:

What day of the week, the time. But very little ... we'll go into who are we sending it to? Are there any issues with the list, the data that might be impacting the results? You'd be surprised how much of an impact it can make, and skewing the data that you're using to make smart decisions on how you should improve your emails.

Crissy:

You might be getting not a great picture, and not great data, just for simple things when it comes to the list in your marketing operation. We wanted to cover a few things that you, as a marketing operations professional, can do to ... across the board just potentially improve those conversion rates without even changing an email. Yeah. Maybe kick it off, Charlie.  

Charlie:

Yeah. And just to add to that, I think a lot of people talk about how email's dead, the channel doesn't work, we're getting really low conversion rates. But I think email isn't dead, and there's tons of examples out there of companies that ... all they do is send an email. Like, The Hustle, these newsletters, The Skimm. Literally their business model is to send email, and they've got millions of subscribers. People like receiving emails if the email is the right email to them.  

Charlie:

But I think for what we're talking about more today is around conversion rates, and how you might not be getting an accurate picture of what your real conversion rates are because of the data issues that you have. So, we're going to jump into an example. We're going to share the screen. And actually before we go there ... that was our sneak peek. But just to set the stage, just doing a little bit of research on what average benchmarks are. So-  

Crissy:

Yeah. And I think this is important. I get this question a lot all the time, too. What are the average email benchmarks? What's a good rate? What's a bad rate? I think this is a good thing to cover first.  

Charlie:

Yeah. And this is easy to find. Just Google this, but we've got a couple of good examples here. Average click-through rate, 2.6%. Average open rate is 17.8%. As you can see here, a little bit more detail. A lot of our clients are in this industry here in tech. Average open, 17.6. Click-through rate, 2.5.  

Charlie:

The other interesting thing about this was open rates by day. If you look at IT tech, it's exactly the same. This is a question we get all the time. What day? What time? I don't think it really matters. There's so many different variables that go into it: whether the person's home, whether they're at work, whether they're commuting, whether they have kids. There isn't going to be a silver bullet all the time. Let me put that one to bed. But anyway, moving on.  

Charlie:

So, look here. Software open rate, 21. click-through rate, 2.45. Now, I would say across our clients, this is pretty accurate. But I think there's something that you literally do overnight to potentially double your conversion rates.  

Charlie:

And it has nothing to do with the copy. It has nothing to do with time of day. It has nothing to do with the content or anything. It's a little bit of a hack, but we think it's quite a powerful thing to add to email strategy that can really help you move forward.

Charlie:

I wanted to go through this example. Now, starting off at the top ... and this is the issue that we're trying to get to now with this video. People are emailing too much. There's this weird misconception in B2B marketing where the more people you email, you think the better results you're going to get. If I email my whole database, I'm going to get X times more responses than if I email half my database. But really, we need to be far more considered about who we're emailing in our database, and do a lot of the marketing ops grunt work to really narrow down our target market for each email sent. Obviously, that's going to improve our conversion rates.  

Charlie:

We wanted to go through this really basic scenario just to prove that, and just to show you kind of different ways or different issues that you might have within your data. Starting off at the beginning here ... say you've got a database, 150,000, 200,000, or something, and you're trying to email most of the people in your database. From that, you got 20,000 opens and 3,000 clicks. That's a 20% open rate and a 3% click-through rate. Kind of around about the average.  

Charlie:

Now, jumping back over to here for ZoomInfo, they've got a lot of statistics about dirty data. I'm not going to go through all of these numbers here, but I've pulled out some of the more interesting ones. You can find this from ... if you just type in ZoomInfo and dirty data. They've each got a source to other companies and pages, kind of like SiriusDecisions and others. This is what a lot of companies do. They've got something they want to send. They choose a huge portion of the database. They send it, and they wonder why they're only getting 3% of people engaging.  

Crissy:

Well, they also ... Can I broaden the list? I want to make sure I get more engagements, and you just see those conversion rates go down, which is ... I think you're going to get there in a second, but this could be why.  

Charlie:

Now, from the ZoomInfo tab I was just on, 7% of leads contained invalid email addresses. 25% of the average B2B database is inaccurate. 10% of leads contain invalid information. If we do the work in our database, I guarantee you that most people listening to this would be able to find around about 15% of that database is bad data.  

Charlie:

Now, if we reduce ... but that bad data is never going to engage. If you remove that 15% obviously from your sends, obviously you're going to improve your conversion rates. If you look at this, you get your send down to 85,000 ... these numbers don't change, because you're still emailing the people that will engage. Like I said, the 15,000 people were never, ever going to engage because they are literally just bad data, and not a human is going to see that. Your open rate is going to improve to 23.5%. Your click-through rate is going to improve to 3.5%.  

Crissy:

Yeah. I think we didn't even add on here ... but just doing that could also just improve how many people the email actually gets delivered to, or people that could convert on it. Even if we say the same number of people engage, but you take out people that wouldn't have converted on it anyway, you could actually even get more conversions, which then boosts your numbers as well. Because if you're emailing people from that company who no longer work there, the spam trap's going to be smart enough to be like, "Oh, hey. This person's spamming us. Don't deliver the emails." That could then kind of bump your delivery rate or engagement there.  

Charlie:

Yeah. Then moving on, we've reduced our database by 15%. They weren't going to engage anyway. Then 37% of email addresses change annually. 30% of people change their jobs annually. Sources, you can go review it in the ZoomInfo tab that I mentioned. So, taking a conservative approach, how many of you have data that you've had in the system for five years, four years, three years? Definitely over a year. It's going to be a huge percentage of your database. How often are you reviewing that using tools to be able to figure out if that data is still legitimate, and then purging old data? How many people are also adding new cold data? Right?

Charlie:

I have a strong opinion about doing that. I don't think it's the right thing to do to add just cold data to database, and then email it. Obviously, there might be a place for just adding cold data. But just emailing it off the bat and including it in your marketing program is probably not the right thing to do. But how much of that cold data is going to come in, and be one of these people that has already changed their job? A lot of these data vendors, they are working hard to try and make sure their data is accurate. But are they updating all of their data every single year? I think that might be a difficult challenge.  

Charlie:

I would say a conservative amount of your database has probably left the company, and not all of those emails will bounce right away. How many people have you been on the recipient of emails that have just been forwarded to you after one of your colleagues has left? Let's just reduce the database size down by 25% by taking out old data, putting on a date filter. Maybe you want to remove any data that's older than a year and hasn't engaged in the last year. You can be more conservative or more kind of gung-ho depending on what you're trying to do.  

Crissy:

Yeah. And we're not even saying remove them from the database. Just don't even include them on your list. You don't even need to be like, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to have to delete all these records." No, just don't include them, or make sure you have them part of a suppression list so you're not emailing.  

Charlie:

Yeah. Remove that 25%. Now, you're sending to about 60,000. Your click-through rate is 4.7, and your open rate is 31. Now, there's the ones that a little bit more ... I don't have a stat from ZoomInfo on this, but just past experience. Please email me, message me on LinkedIn if you think I'm wrong. I would say a lot of the time, our segmentations aren't where they need to be in our marketing automation platform. Our data isn't where it needs to be to be able to run our segmentations properly. We're probably including a lot of the wrong audience, right? Say you're trying to go after people in IT, but you're emailing other ... some people in marketing.

Charlie:

There's going to be a degree of your audience that is just the wrong audience. But in the eagerness to improve or increase the list size to keep the rest of the company happy to show that we're doing a lot of marketing and trying to engage people, we're emailing the wrong people. Call it 20%. Now, we got our list down to almost half where it was before which, of course, is going to double our click-through rate.  

Charlie:

We started off with a click-through rate of 3%. And just going through relatively conservatively, we can double our click-through rate without actually changing what we're doing from the actual content ... an email point of view. Yes, I know this is super simplistic. Not all of these numbers will be accurate for your company. And yes, I know one of the other things that a lot of people are going to say would be, "Okay. Charlie, this is great. We've just kind of artificially maybe improved our click-through rate just by emailing less people. But we want to actually engage with more people. Like. The amount of people that we're engaging with is still 3,000."  

Charlie:

Yes. Now, we look better that we're getting this better click-through rate, but it's still 3,000. I think this comes down to kind of what you were just saying before and other reasons. My response to that would be now you actually have a more condensed list, and you can actually get a more realistic click-through rate. Now, you're going to be able to test to figure out what is working, what is not working. Because if you had an artificially low engagement rate based on these factors that we just mentioned, it's very hard for you to figure out kind of ... was this even a good email? Was the copy good? Was the offer good? Because there was thousands, thousands of people that literally were never going to engage whatever you sent them.  

Charlie:

The other thing is, like Crissy mentioned, it's more likely to get picked up by ... like, the people that were additional on this list would be more likely to be picked up by spam filters. That's going to affect your email reputation. They're emailing that specific company. You might get blocked. You might start hitting spam traps. All things that are going to make things harder for you going forward.  

Charlie:

With that and being able to test better, you could actually start improving the engagement volume, not just the percentage, over time. And then the other thing is you're just less likely to upset people. If you're emailing people who ... like in the last group that are the wrong audience for that specific message, they might be the right audience for another message. But now they've unsubscribed. Now, you're never going to be able to email them again and your engagement volume, not just the conversion rate, is going to be impacted going forward.

Crissy:

Totally. I think this whole example just further proves the importance of foundations. I think as marketing operations pros that are just busy, I think some of these very simple foundational things will sometimes get skipped, or missed, or not thought of. But if you compare it to even fitness training ... if you're trying to PR your squat, if you don't even know how to do a squat, or maybe you're just doing it wrong, how are you going to improve that? You're just doing it wrong from the start. You need to kind of take away the thing that might be fighting against you. That's just simple. This is correction. Build the foundation, and then you can add on more and more testing. But to your point, you need that kind of real true baseline in order to see those real statistics.

Charlie:

Plus as well by removing groups, it doesn't mean ... like you said before, you're going to delete them and never engage with them. A lot of the people on these lists, they might be old data who haven't engaged for a while, so they didn't make it onto your list. But they might still be working at that company. But you need to treat them differently. If they haven't engaged for the last 10 emails, why send them the 11th?  

Charlie:

So, maybe targeted display, maybe sales outreach, maybe a re-engagement email program might even be the thing to trigger the engagement instead of them getting a random webinar email, a random white paper email. It's not about just reducing the volume to get a better conversion rate. It's about reducing it to focus your efforts on the people that are going to engage with that specific email, and then take your time to intelligently figure out what you're going to do with the rest. That could be purging, or reengaging with them, or using different channels. But at the end of the day, it's just making sure you're not kidding yourself that the bigger the list, the better your results.  

Crissy:

Yeah. I think that was a great example seeing that just upfront, and seeing the stats, and how you can affect your conversion rate off the bat. Super important for you guys out there in marketing ops. Or if you're in demand gen and you're wondering why your conversion rates are so poor, this can be a great conversation starter for you and your marketing ops team to figure out how you can maybe reduce your list size, and how you can do that by taking out people who won't engage, or bad data. So forth. So forth.  

Charlie:

Yeah. The one thing that might raise some concerns is if you do that, if you get rid of your bad data, if you get rid of the people who aren't the right audience, if you get rid of old data and then you have nothing left, then you have a completely different problem other than email. That'll be a whole nother video.  

Crissy:

Yeah. Hope that was super useful for you guys. If you put that into practice and you see your conversion rates go up, let us know. We love to hear the stories. We'll see you next time on Forward.