Photo by visuals on UnsplashWebinars are a big deal in B2B marketing. Higher ticket purchases typically require more touchpoints — even more effective when you put faces behind the touchpoints.
But many webinars fail to get people to sign up.
Email is the cheapest and quickest way to get sign-ups flowing through the door.
But with a 2% to 3% conversion rate for B2B emails, 3 sign-ups for every 100 emails is barely moving the needle.
We can grow the subscribers list, and send out more emails to increase total sign-ups while keeping the same conversion rate.
Rome wasn't built in a day, growing subscribers takes time and continuous effort. Some businesses don't have the luxury of time. And at times, B2B's niche audience is limited by size.
Our solution as B2B marketers? Increase email conversion rate.
Challenges with Standard Emails
All along, our webinar invitation emails were pretty standard — a nice-looking HTML email sitting quietly in our subscribers' inboxes.
These email invites tend to get lost in the shuffle. Left aside, and forgotten. Whenever a subscriber hits that CTA button, and signs up on the webinar page — it feels like hitting a jackpot.
Since we own a niched subscribers list, we had a good grasp on what is considered relevant, compelling content to them.
And the best conversion rate we can get?
14% conversion from emails delivered to sign-ups.
Not a small feat. But…
How do we do better?
Implementing AMP Emails
Then we came across Mailmodo — a tool to create and send AMP emails.
There are NO affiliate links here whatsoever, so don't worry. Feel free to explore other AMP solution providers out there.
For starters, AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It lets you insert interactive elements (ie, calculators, forms, surveys) in emails. So your subscribers can take immediate action in the email itself. It's like having a mini webpage inside an email.
This time, our email's big, bright, glaring CTA button did something different than its usual <a href="my-awesome-webinar-page"></a>.
What's different?
The form is directly embedded into the AMP email. No redirections like our previous HTML emails, with minimal user actions required. So the subscribers could sign up even when they're on toilet breaks.
HTML vs AMP emails user journeyMailmodo's user sees a 280% uplift in webinar registrations. Maybe this could double our conversion too?
The No-BS, Unfiltered Results
After switching from standard emails to AMP emails, we suited up, rehearsed our speech, and were all ready to announce to the world that we had successfully doubled our conversion rates!
Except, we did not.
This is the unpolished, raw, actual conversion rates from our AMP emails experiment.
Both webinars had the same speaker, email writer, and list of subscribers (with few additional subscribers in Webinar 2 emails). There was a slight difference in webinar topics, but it was still under the same theme.
Webinar 1 emails are sent via Hubspot (our CRM), with send time optimization; while Webinar 2 emails are sent via Mailmodo, without send time optimization.
Despite not having send time optimization, we saw a 4% uplift in conversion rates with AMP emails, while the attendance rate remained in our usual range.
Are we happy about it? Sort of.
A 4% uplift is a big deal given we've got a small-ish subscribers list in a niche market. Every 1% uplift is a win for us.
Are we disappointed? Sort of.
Having seen success stories with > 200% uplifts, of course we set our eyes on that range too.
But it is unfair to do an apple-to-apple comparison since we don't know the baseline numbers behind Mailmodo's success stories.
For instance, a 300% uplift with a 1-digit baseline is easy. But for a 300% uplift with a 4-digit baseline? Not as simple.
So this post is to set your expectations right with a realistic case study. In our case, we had a 3-digit number of subscribers as the baseline, and our standard HTML emails were fairly optimized before testing out AMP emails.
Regardless, it's a good start, seeing the needle move by a few percentage points. Every 1% uplift increases our chances of winning a new sale.
But here is what we would do differently next time to hopefully double our conversion rate.
If you are considering launching AMP emails, our learnings could save you some trial & error time and cost.
What went well with our AMP emails?
While we're considering whether to experiment with AMP emails or not, we had some concerns before getting started.
You might share some of these concerns, here's our take:
- What happens to recipients who are using email clients that don't support AMP emails?
Not all email clients (aka email receiving platform) support AMP emails. As of now, these are the email clients that support AMP emails — Gmail, Yahoo, and Mail.ru.
For the rest, it's important to have fallback HTML email (aka the standard HTML email) in place. Using a tool like Mailmodo saves time from creating another HTML email from scratch.
Before deciding if you should try AMP emails to increase conversion rates, identify what's your subscribers' majority email clients beforehand.
In our case, the majority of them are using Gmail, so it's a viable strategy to use AMP emails to increase our conversion rates — by making it easy for the majority to sign up for the webinar.
2. Does it take too much time and cost to implement AMP emails?
AMP emails are very accessible these days with the solution providers' drag-and-drop email builders. Using about the same time to create standard HTML emails, the results uplifted from AMP emails could be very rewarding.
For the experiment above, we selected Mailmodo's Lite plan (aka the cheapest monthly subscription) to get started at $49/ month. It's already sufficient for our use case (read below for some heads-up!).
The total cost for our experiment is less than $100 including man-hours. The most time-consuming part was syncing data between Hubspot and Mailmodo via Make since direct integration is unavailable for Lite plan users.
For an experiment that doesn't cost much, it is worth a try. But I would prioritize optimizing and AB testing with your existing HTML emails first if you haven't done so, before diving into AMP emails.
As for us, upon experiencing AMP email's impact, we might AB test it with other content types and use cases — collecting NPS from our clients, automating Calendly booking emails post-website interaction, etc. There's a good number of examples in Mailmodo to spark some ideas!
What will we do differently next time?
If we were to restart the experiment above, these are the things that we would do differently to 2X our conversion; and to reduce total time and cost spent.
Our learnings and recommendations will come in handy to maximize your results and ROI on your first trial with AMP emails.
- Once you've signed up for an account, immediately apply for domain whitelisting before anything else
Here's the step-by-step provided by Mailmodo to send your first AMP emails. We followed the steps provided and had everything up and running in 13 days.
But we made the mistake of waiting until the email draft was ready before kickstarting the domain whitelisting process, which increased the total lag time (illustrated below).
AMP emails setup processIt takes up to 15 days for approval (in our case it took 8 days). To reduce risk and speed up the entire process, it is best to immediately set up a custom domain & whitelisting immediately to initiate the approval process.
In case of disapproval, you won't panic at the last minute when your webinar is happening soon.
2. Try out other Mailmodo's features — AB testing, email click maps, send time optimization & timezone based scheduling
All these features are only available for their higher-tier subscription plans (at $99/mo). At the time of testing, we weren't convinced to invest more. Now that we've seen AMP email results, we might test out the rest of these features to boost our conversion rates further.
If you're anything like us , wanting to experiment with AMP emails, the entry-level plan (Lite at $49/ mo) should be sufficient.
But these are some heads-ups we wished we were prepared for:
- If your standard HTML email has send time optimization enabled in the past, for a fair comparison, consider enabling it for your AMP emails experiment (ie, sign up for $99/mo).
- Hubspot & Salesforce have direct integration with Mailmodo, only available at the Highest tier plan at $199/mo. You can workaround it using Make or Zapier to sync your contacts and campaign data to and from Mailmodo.
- Export all your Mailmodo campaign data before your subscription ends. Once your monthly subscription is due, all your data is no longer retrievable.
3. Explore other AMP email providers like Mailercloud
Before running the experiment above, we weren't aware of Mailercloud.
At first glance, Mailercloud seemed to have all the features Mailmodo provides at a lower cost. If we were to restart the AMP email experiment, we would compare the two before deciding on our go-to AMP email provider — in terms of features, integrations & cost.
Leave a comment if you want a detailed comparison between the two.
4. Pay attention to the form details in your AMP emails
AMP emails have simplified the sign-up process by minimizing user actions. With AMP emails, ONE CTA button click is all it takes to register the recipients for webinars. There are zero form fills necessary.
What a game-changer!
But AMP and standard HTML emails CTA buttons can look similar. Users may expect to be redirected to a landing page upon clicking the CTA button, which is typical HTML email behavior.
They might find AMP's immediate registration with just a button click to be confusing and contrary to their intentions.
It is best to have a short and simple form (see example below) in AMP email for:
- Better user experience by reducing cognitive load and leveraging simplicity bias
- Preventing any false positive clicks (aka accidental registration) from bots scanning for spam/ malware or email clients assessing the email links for previews
Example of a simple & short form in AMP emailsFinal thoughts
All in all, AMP emails are worth a try if you want to improve your email conversion rates. You should see a positive ROI by avoiding our mistakes and reducing the overall time and cost to launch the AMP emails. But setting a 2x goal might be unrealistic if you're testing it out for the first time.
If you want to drive better engagement and higher sign-up rates for your webinars, consider trying AMP emails. They might just be the missing link in improving your sign-ups!
If you've decided to test AMP emails out, hope our experience makes the unknown less scary and more reassuring.
If you've tried AMP emails before, leave a comment to share your experience with us too!
📢 Shoutout to Stephanie from Brighttail for collaborating with me to write this piece. If you need help in B2B webinars or in setting up Make/ Zapier to integrate your CRM with AMP email platforms, reach out to her at Brighttail! (Disclaimer, Brighttail is my ex-employer)
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