When it comes to marketing and sales, success rates for email are usually higher than any other channel.  In fact it’s one of the most transparent platforms in that it gives you a clear picture with the various email marketing metrics. One of those metrics that can tell how good your mails are performing is email conversion rate (ECR). It represents the percentage of email recipients who have completed your desired action, which in most cases is related to the placed order. So basically it determines if what you are doing is successful or not.

How to calculate your email conversion rate

To calculate your email conversion rate, you simply need to divide the number of conversions by the number of successful email deliveries and then multiply the result by 100.

However, simply calculating the number will be not enough to understand if you are doing well or not, because you must have some kind of a benchmark to know what is considered a high or insufficient email conversion rate as part of your important email marketing metrics.

So what is a good email conversion rate?

This is a great question that unfortunately has no exact answer. It is very personal and different for each individual situation based on the market, industry, store size, email list quality, email content, your main goal (what do you consider as a conversion), etc.. So the best answer would be that a good email conversion rate is something better than what you have today.
Luckily, there are analyses that can give us a look into the broader view and understand the general ECR situation in the market.
In 2020, Klaviyo gathered data from 50.000 companies and made some great findings.
Analyzing data from campaigns they have found out that depending on the industry ECR is between 0.07% and 0.28%:

Meanwhile flows had noticeably higher conversion rates which are not surprising as flows are normally more targeted and aimed at already engaged customers. ECR here varied between 0.96% and 2.13% depending on the market.

As you can see the differences between the results are quite significant. This just proves one more time that email conversion rate is a very individual metric. You should take into account the benchmarks of your competitors that are in the same industry but in the end, your focus should always be on how to improve the email conversion rate you have right now.

Also, remember that usually actions that are considered as conversions (placed orders, filled forms, etc.) can not be done directly in the email. Email can only advertise and encourage your customers to take the action but the final step has to be made on your website or landing page. So when you are evaluating the performance of your emails pay high attention to such metrics as open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, bounce rate, etc. And if all of these metrics are at a healthy level but your conversion rate is low, there is a high chance the problem is not in the emails but in your website or landing page.

If you are not satisfied with your current conversion rate and need help improving it, feel free to reach out and get advice.