When it comes to conversion rates, we often hear email marketers tout the fact that their favored form of marketing converts at a rate higher than others. They love to tell everyone they beat the rest and how email is the best investment for those looking to convert. But while the numbers may be true, they don’t tell the whole story. Stop bragging email marketers, your conversion rates aren’t as impressive as you make them seem.
Stop Bragging About Conversion Rates
Are email conversion rates high? Yes. Is there a LOT more to the story? Big time.
Focusing on conversion rates only tells part of the picture. What it ignores is all the work that it took to get there. Before you can ever get to the point of sending an email and converting someone, there’s a lot of other work that happens. Long before a potential lead ends up on a email marketer’s list, many other people did work to get them there. From the social media marketer that created the promoted campaign which drove them to your website, to the content marketer who concepted the piece they saw, and the writer whose call to action compelled them to fill out the lead gen form and join your email list, there are a lot of people that had to do their job before an email ever ends up on the email list.
Emails should convert more because the medium is almost entirely focused on conversions (not necessarily bottom of funnel conversion but conversions that move someone along in the sales cycle). Saying that email converts more than other areas of digital marketing is like saying that bottom of funnel material converts more than top of funnel. We’d certainly hope that a tactic which focuses heavily on conversions is far better at producing conversions than those less focuses on such outcomes.
Email Is Still Great
None of this is to say that email isn’t a great way to engage and convert current and potential customers. It’s simply that email marketers need to stop bragging and give credit to all the other work that goes into getting to the point where success can happen. In the same way that sales people must give credit to the marketers that attract a potential customer, then moved them through the marketing funnel before turning them over to sales as a sales qualified lead, email marketers must recognize the other marketers that helped them get to the point at which email can succeed. Without those other marketers, email marketers would have no one on their lists or lists filled with completely uninterested and non-targeted names.
Give credit where credit is due. Email may be great at converting but there is far more to the story. We can’t measure total success without measuring all steps along the way and we must acknowledge the contributions of everyone involved in working towards the common goal of turning potential clients into current (and repeat) customers. Be a bit humble and share how success was a team effort, rather than simply that of a single part of the process.
