From David Cacioppo’s Keynote Presentation, emfluence User Conference 2010,
EMAIL ROI: LET IT ROCK!
How do you measure the success of your email marketing campaigns? When our clients ask us our thoughts, we encourage them to measure email marketing like you do any other kind of marketing: by calculating your Return On Investment (ROI). Sure, we know that you know that email marketing still has the highest ROI of any marketing channel (Source: DMA). But are you actually measuring your success?
If you sell a product through a direct response channel, online or offline, you have the best metric you can get: an actual ROI. To calculate your revenue per subscriber for a given campaign, take a look at the Total Revenues divided by the total list size. You can use these figures to compare email marketing campaigns, like in this table:
Looking at this chart, it looks like the New Customer Bounce-back is a high performer, even if it’s not a high quantity send.
If you don’t sell through direct response, then you have to look for the next best metric:
- Lead form completed online
- Inbound call
- Website visit, viewed a demo or downloaded a file
- Clicks, views
You can track views, clicks and better yet, conversions, but one of the most important metrics to your email marketing team is the value of each valid email address. This is your ammunition to spend money on a promotion to grow your list. It’s your justification when you ask for a budget for list scrubs, re-permission campaigns and other good list hygiene tactics.
Take a look back at the chart. If you’re averaging $1.05 per subscriber every month, over the course of a year, what’s the value of that email address? What about over the course of the email address’ lifetime?
It all depends on what you sell and how quickly, of course. And if you calculate the value of each of your email addresses and find they are worth $40, $1000, a car a piece, then you should make the most of them.
So, optimizing your revenue per subscriber should be a key focus for your marketing team. You should first be sure you’re getting into those email addresses you already know. Then, make sure you’re getting the most out of those subscribers. Last but not least, of course, every email marketing pro wants to learn how to grow their subscriber list to get more killer ROI.
Want to know the 9 key ways to achieve these three things? Check out the takeaways from Dave’s full keynote presentation.
