sales from SEO. We knew we were getting referral traffic. We also knew we were getting affiliates to promote us. But we didn’t know how much each of those contributed to our sales each day, week, and month.
More difficult was that we
couldn’t predict how much revenue we could achieve any phone number list day, week or month ahead. This started to create difficulties with our purchasing. We simply didn’t know how much wine to commit to our suppliers. Some days we would sell 5 cases and other days we would sell 50.
So, we chose a channel to dive into and that channel was email marketing for e-commerce. We knew that email campaigns would be useful for us. We knew that email campaigns can be incredibly rewarding and successful. And, as I said before, our goal was to tell the stories of the people behind the wines and we thought that email was the best way to do that.
We knew our email commerce
efforts were helping us build relationships with our investor conference call information customers. But quantifying the financial value of our email marketing efforts was difficult.
In other words, We spent 60 days really understanding our email marketing efforts and email campaigns. We looked at our open rates and click-through rates. We compared them to others. We tested sending one email per week versus multiple emails per week. We tried different copy. We learned all about email deliverability and staying out of spam filters.
We experimented with every subject line and looked at subject lines from other ecommerce companies to see what we could do. We tested days of the week and times of day to send our email campaigns.
We learned all about what others were doing to succeed in ecommerce email marketing. We reworked and reworked our email marketing strategy. What seemed to work one day, wouldn’t work the next. But we kept pushing and trying to learn.
In other words, One thing that kept nagging at us was that we really fresh list needed a “North Star Metric” that we could use to be successful in our email efforts. Then one day we were in a meeting and I asked, “How much is an email subscriber worth to us?” And no one knew the answer.
