How to Calculate Email Conversion Rates
Marketing emails contain an offer, also known as a call to action. When the recipient responds affirmatively, that is a conversion. Examples are making a purchase or opening an account.
Marketers calculate their conversion rates in two ways, depending on their environment.
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Instructions
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Calculate Email Conversions
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Simple Conversion Rate
If your email marketing campaign is isolated, meaning no other marketing efforts are underway at the same time, calculating your conversion rate is easy.
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Count the number of affirmative responses, and divide them by the number of people on your email list.
Example: Let us say you sent 347,298 emails and received 1,791 affirmative responses.
Your calculation would be 1,791 divided by 347,298, which equals .005.
Your conversion rate is .5%, which is consistent with industry standards.
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Net Conversion Rate
Calculating your email conversion rate is more complex if multiple marketing campaigns occur simultaneously. In that scenario, ask yourself how many of those affirmative responses are directly attributable to your email. Perhaps the responders heard the offer on the radio or saw a billboard.
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How can you be reasonably certain that the affirmative responses resulted from the email? That answer lays in a control group.
To set up a control group, select your email file as you normally would. Randomly select 5% of the email file, and do not send the email to that group.
Now you will calculate two conversion rates, one for the group to whom you mailed and one for the control group, and compare the two conversion rates.
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Example: Let us say you sent the same 347,298 emails and received 1,791 affirmative responses. In this scenario, however, let us also assume that the emails sent comprised only a portion of your file and you held out a control group of 18,312.
Let us further assume that 27 people in your control file also responded affirmatively, independent of the email.
Your calculation of the conversion rate for the control group would be 27 divided by 18,318, which equals .00147.
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Now calculate your net conversion rate, which is the conversion rate of your email, less the conversion rate of your control group.
That would be .005, less .00147, which equals .00353.
Your net conversion rate is .35%.
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