While sitting in an executive business meeting during my corporate gig, I was asked one of the most important marketing questions in my life at that point:
Trev, what are your revenue per email numbers?
I remember feeling like a deer in headlights, having no idea that revenue per email was even an important marketing metric.
Embarrassed that I had no answer for my fellow executives and boss, I decided to dig into some research.
Rather than just assessing open and click-through rates for the remainder of my entire marketing career, I learned that revenue per email would be quite a valuable metric to track. It would help us understand our company’s return on investment, specifically for email marketing.
Then I discovered that I was not alone – research has indicated that less than a third of marketers even track revenue per email!
I thought it would be great to really break down what I’ve learned here to help others effectively track this metric; after all, without tracking revenue per email, how will you know when to spend more on your campaigns?
First off, if you are using a platform like Mailchimp, there is a free integration with Google Analytics to allow you to track goal conversions.
Your revenue per email numbers will then be automatically calculated every time your email subscriber takes a transactional action on your website.
There are plenty more integrations, both free and paid, to allow you to track sales conversions. I recommend Google Analytics as it gives you much more detail related to ads and traffic, without any cost.
If you’re old-school, you can always use a spreadsheet or calculator to track the metric. This assumes you can directly relate purchasing behaviour to your email campaigns.
In order to calculate revenue per email, you can calculate it one of two ways: per delivered emails or per all emails.
For simplicity’s sake, without fudging the numbers, I go with revenue per ALL emails. The reason I do this is because total emails sent reflect the quality of the list and the marketer’s ability to list-clean undelivered emails.
Thus, the calculation is straightforward: divide the revenue earned from that email campaign by the total number of emails sent for the campaign.
If you start tracking revenue per email with all of your campaigns, you will begin to optimize your marketing efforts for sales conversions – that makes you a powerful marketer.
To take your email marketing learning to new heights, check out my free video course here.