Author: Kara McCartney

As your business grows, you need to communicate with your customers at scale. Leveraging marketing channels like email can free up time and resources, but it comes at a cost.

Sending mass e-blasts to current and potential customers has a tendency to feel impersonal and intrusive. In fact, “blasting” your entire list time and time again is widely accepted as a poor marketing strategy — one that will spike your unsubscribe rate and potentially land you in the spam folder.

Want to connect with new and potential customers? You’ll need to invest in one or more types of email marketing.

Email has proven to be one of the most lucrative content marketing channels in existence. In fact, research shows that email has a 3800% ROI, bringing in $38 for every $1 spent. Plus, no matter who your target audience is, chances are your consumers use email on a daily basis. In 2020, there were over 4 billion email users worldwide, a number that’s expected to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025.

As a small business owner, you’re used to overseeing many moving parts. To keep things running smoothly, you have tools, systems, and processes in place — and email marketing should be no different.

Roughly 333 billion emails are sent every single day, and the average office worker receives 121 emails every workday. As a business owner, you could be emailing hundreds — if not thousands — of potential customers each week. Just how are you supposed to keep a 10,000-foot view of all of these campaigns?

That’s where email campaign management comes into play. 

As a business owner, your mind is often focused on one word: Growth. You strive for the growth of your company, growth of your loyal customer base, and even growth of your email list. 

But sometimes, you need to take a step back, asking yourself, “Am I growing simply for the sake of growth, and could this growth be a detriment to my business?”

The purpose of lead nurturing is to build a relationship with qualified leads so you can eventually convert them into sales. One of the best tools for building that relationship is an email nurture campaign. 

A nurture campaign is a series of automated emails that aims to educate and build a relationship with the reader. Why? Because like it or not, the vast majority of subscribers within your email list simply aren’t ready to convert.

The purpose of marketing isn’t just to grow your audience. Instead, you want to transform subscribers into qualified leads, which will (hopefully) lead to a sale.

Email is one of the most effective channels when it comes to lead nurturing. In fact, research shows that 60% of consumers subscribe to brands’ email lists, but only 20% of consumers will follow those same brands on social media. As a best practice, you should always track how many of your subscribers convert to first-time buyers.

Fortunately, many email marketing platforms provide you with the metrics needed to track conversions. That way, you can make science-backed tweaks to your marketing strategy, if needed, rather than relying on your own gut instinct. Below, we explain what email conversion rate is, how to calculate it, and how to improve it.