TL;DR
Despite the rise of social commerce and conversational AI, email remains the undisputed king of ROI for marketers. In fact, top-performing brands are generating an average ROI of up to $45 for every $1 spent on email marketing.
But the game of email marketing has dramatically changed. It’s harder than ever to get your messages delivered, opened, and engaged with – while getting subscribers to actually convert is an even bigger challenge.
So, how do you cut through the noise and improve your email conversion rates in 2026? You don’t send more emails – you send better ones, more strategically. In this blog, we’ll walk you through 5 ways to optimize your email marketing conversion rate and ensure your email marketing efforts don’t go wasted.
An email marketing conversion rate measures the percentage of your email recipients who take a desired action after opening your email. This action is your specific conversion goal, such as:
Naturally, the higher your email conversion rate it, the better. And for most marketers, email conversion rate is one of the top email marketing metrics to track to evaluate the overall success of their email marketing campaigns.
To calculate your email conversion rate, simply divide the number of your email recipients who completed a desired action (conversion) by the total number of delivered emails, and then multiply this number by 100 to get a percentage. Here’s what the formula looks like:
(Number of conversions /number of delivered emails) x 100 = email conversion rate
Let’s say you sent 10,000 emails, 9,800 of them were delivered, and 300 of your email recipients went on to purchase your product after clicking through the email. Your email conversion rate would be:
(300 conversions /9,800 delivered emails) x 100 = 3,06% email conversion rate
Based on industry statistics, a good email marketing conversion rate is typically 2–5% for most brands. But that varies depending on a number of factors:
If you’re looking to improve your email conversion rates, your subject lines are where to start. The subject line is the first impression of your email in a crowded inbox – and it’s the make-or-break factor that determines whether a recipient will actually open it or not.
Jay Schwedelson, one of the top marketing experts in the U.S. and founder of SubjectLine.com, shared insights on what’s working in email marketing right now at the recent INBOUND 2025 event. So, here are some examples of what works well in terms of subject lines, according to Schwedelson:
Recommended reading: 11 Tips to increase your email marketing open rate
Poorly crafted subject lines aren’t the only conversion killers. CTA buttons within your emails matter more than most marketers realize. And based on Jay Schwedelson’s insights, using first-person language in your email CTAs can increase click-through rates by 20%. Here’s what it might look like for ecommerce and retail brands:
Purchase / add to cart:
Sale / discount / promo:
Loyalty / rewards:
Based on stats from Genesys, in 2025, mobile devices accounted for 55%+ of all email opens globally. That’s why making your emails mobile-friendly is no longer optional if you want to increase your conversion rates. Here are some best practices for optimizing your emails for mobile:
Personalization goes a long way in improving your email conversion rates. But when it comes to email marketing, personalization no longer means just using your subscribers’ names. Users want highly tailored content and offers based on their preferences and unique shopping behavior. Fortunately, modern email marketing platforms provide marketers with a wealth of AI-powered tools to deliver better personalization. These are, for example:
By analyzing customer behavior and past interactions, AI empowers you to send hyper-personalized emails that feel tailor-made for each subscriber. The outcome? Better engagement and higher conversion rates.
Improving your email conversion rate doesn’t have to be a guessing game. That’s where A/B testing comes into play, helping you make more data-driven decisions about your email marketing practices.
Running split test campaigns (A/B testing campaigns) is an excellent opportunity to find out what’s working best. It involves comparing two versions of your email to determine which one leads to more conversions. Better yet, you can test multiple email elements, including the copy, email format, CTAs, and sending times. The rule of thumb here is to test one element at a time so you know exactly what’s driving better results.
With the right strategies and best practices in mind, improving your email conversion rate becomes far more achievable – and Maropost Marketing Cloud gives you all the tools you need to make it happen. Those include:
Book a demo now to see Maropost Marketing Cloud in action and learn how exactly it can help you craft and send emails that convert.
Instead of sending generic email blasts to everyone, AI helps you personalize emails based user behavior, preferences, and purchase intent, ensuring your messages deliver more value and convert much better. AI can automatically adjust content, product recommendations, and send times for each individual recipient, predicting what they’re most likely to engage with and when they’re most likely to buy. That helps you increase, opens, clicks, and conversions.
Deliverability directly affects your email conversion rates because if an email lands in the spam folder or is blocked by ISPs, the conversion rate is automatically zero. Poor deliverability creates a "leaky bucket" effect where your email messages (no matter how relevant they are) never reach your audience, artificially depressing your overall email conversion metrics. Strong deliverability, on the other hand, leads to higher opens, clicks, and ultimately more conversions.
Besides conversion rate, marketers should track metrics like open rate, click-through rate (CTR), and revenue per email to understand how effectively their email campaigns are performing. Additionally, tracking deliverability, bounce rate, list growth rate, and unsubscribe rate helps you reveal the overall health of your email program.
Plus, tracking behavioral metrics (like engagement score) helps identify high- and low-intent audiences. Together, these metrics give you a complete picture of what’s working well and where your email marketing strategy needs improvement.