Rush rush rush, many marketers are faced with an ever expanding job description, print, web, social… EMAIL! When will you get it all done with so little time and less resources? That is a question that many of my clients face every day. I hear so often after sharing my recommendations of what the program could be doing, I love that feature but I just do not have time to implement. You are not alone! Remember back to yesterday's post I wrote about the ROI of your email program. Understanding your ROI will help determine if you should be focusing more time on email and allocating more resources that way. Once you know if your email program is accomplishing your financial goals it would be easier to decide, do I need to spend more time myself on our program or should I partner up with my ESP to have them deliver strategy and implementation of some of the recommendations I don’t have time to implement but know could enhance my ROI?
Many programs send all the time with little strategy or justification for the send, other programs is the exact opposite. I see this more and more with newer clients who are starting out for the first time building their lists, and creating their first email campaigns. The hang up here is often the fear of hitting send and wondering if they have everything perfect. Don’t get me wrong, an email without grammatical errors is great but an email that never goes out because the content is stale is detrimental. If you never send it your audience will never know it existed. Are you one of those companies that know email is a good idea but just can’t seem to get it out the door? Start with a content calendar! It can go a long way in helping you get the email out the door.
It is great to be cautious but don’t miss out on an opportunity because you are striving for perfection! Your readers are more forgiving than you think! Learn from your experiences and begin to use that to tailor and grow your email program in to a fine tune machine!
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Do you have an answer to that question? If you don’t you are not alone. Tracking the ROI of your email program can be difficult if you don’t know where to start. So, where do you start? What will you track and how do you determine the results? What is the value of an email subscriber? How much do I spend in time and money to use my email service provider? These are all things you need to know to understand the ROI. Here are a few examples of how to get started!
First of all, the easiest way to track ROI is if you are selling something online - Delivra offers the ability to track the total purchased amount from a single email that then can be aggregated across a campaign or a year of time to leverage how much your email program is pulling in. But, that is the simplest form, not every email program is directly selling products in an email. For that, you might consider something similar to the following example:
Let's say my business offers free online training with the hopes that those who attend will sign up for a membership to have full access to the training content. My email program is used to generate attendees to my free training sessions. At first, you might think, well I am not selling anything in my email - how would I track what my email program generates in a dollar amount? The answer is to look further down the pipeline; you are selling a membership. Let's pretend the membership is $50.00 per month and the average life span of a user is 5 years. This tells me the lifetime value of a member is roughly $3000.00.
Now let's look at the percentage of people we have that RSVP for the free training. On average my email to 100 people generates 25 signups, of that 20 attend and 10 actually become a member from that training. I could then say that my email generated roughly 30,000.00 in lifetime value from the 10 new members that signed up. There you go! Now you have something to start talking about when you are asked, well, what is your email program worth?
Furthermore, knowing and understanding your email program's worth will help justify your sends. If you know that the free online training emails generate about $30k in lifetime value, then you may determine that more or less of these emails are needed. You will also learn quickly that by segmenting your list and targeting email subscribers that have a higher probability of signing up will cut your investment and increase your ROI.
So, when and how will you find out what your email program is worth? Contact an Account Manager if you have questions about Purchase Tracking or just need help identifying how to measure your ROI!
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