Here’s a list of common conversion events in email marketing. Feel free to use some of these for your own email campaigns.
- Purchase — Probably the most common conversion event that you’ll use in your email campaigns (but not all of them) is the typical purchase. Because of the email you sent, the person clicks to your landing page and signs up for your product or service.
- Survey Response — It’s important to get to know your list: who are they, what do they want, love, fear, desire, hate, think? The better you know your list, the better you’ll be able to adapt your emails to their wants and needs. Of course, your list is a fluid thing. It will change over time, which means that the desires and needs of your list will also change over time. You can use surveys to keep up with those changes.
- Preference Setting — One of the best ways to segment your email list so that you can then send more relevant content to each subscriber is by using a subscription management center. There, your subscribers can indicate how often they want to receive emails and what kind of content they want to receive. If you send a campaign encouraging your email list to set their individual preferences, then this qualifies as a conversion event for that email campaign.
- Follow Social Media — While email is one of the most valuable places to collect subscribers (with email, you have complete control over your audience and your marketing methods), it’s not the only place that you might want to collect subscribers. Sometimes, you’ll want to encourage your email subscribers to go follow you on YouTube or Facebook or even Instagram so that they see more of your content on multiple channels. In that case, subscribers following you on social media because of an email you sent qualifies as a conversion event.
- Read Content — Imagine that you send one of your blog posts to your email list. There’s a big difference between people who click and then almost instantly click away and people who click, read, and stay for a few minutes. Instead of tracking just the click from an email, you can also track how people engaged with page that you sent them to; did they stay for several minutes? Did they browse the rest of your website? Or did they leave quickly? This info might be what you’re interested in most for a given email campaign, making it the conversion event. Consider using a landing page analyzer like CrazyEgg or Hotjar to collect this kind of valuable information.
- Download Content — Instead of sending your email subscribers a link to your blog content, you might provide them with a free downloadable resource. In that case, the subscriber clicking on your email doesn’t represent a conversion. You’re interested in people actually downloading the resource that you sent them, not just clicking on your email. The number of people who download your resource, and maybe even the number of people who follow the CTA at the end of the downloadable resource, is the real conversion event.