My Two Cents
As a non-rookie to this marketing space, I’ve seen a lot of scenarios that would make an email marketing veteran cringe. I’ve seen small things from improper HTML architecture all the way down to mislabeled from names and wrong tracking or content in a deployment. There are a myriad of variants that compose email marketing as a whole and it requires a skilled marketer to understand the whole picture within the channel. I tend to think of email marketers as a bit of a hybrid professional, most are not ultra-technical and have to understand the entire channel even the technical aspects. It requires an astute, quick-learning, nimble, big picture thinking, granular data analyzing, creative, logical, marketer/analyst/developer type of person. These type of people are special to this channel due to the requirements needed to make email marketing successful, it’s a left and right-brained person that fits this channel best. Email marketing has been around for a fairly long time now. Not as long as traditional channels, of course; but long enough to create best practices, governing rules/laws, create careers around and even multi-million dollar companies. Even so, email is neglected, abused and under utilized.
The Value of Email
The topic of today’s post is around the “value” of email. Whether you’re focused on branding, sales, transactional, general marketing, newsletters, etc – email is not free. Even if you’re company has one person doing the emails – it’s not free. Regardless of vendor relationships, business agreements, funding, etc – email is not free. Someone will always pay for the email deployment. Whether, the cost is in the hardware, software, SaaS tools, labor, overhead, etc – someone will pay. That’s not the true cost of email though. While all of these things have obvious monetary value, we as marketers generally miss the items that aren’t obviously monetary. Such as – per email value or list cost.
Email is a powerful channel, when utilized correctly the ROI can be as high as 43-to-1. Knowing that this is true, it’s imperative for an organization to know the value of the lists on a per contact basis that they own. This gives the true picture back to the business what email is actually doing for them in regards to revenue and profit. This view into the value of each email address can change the perspective of an entire organization in how they utilize email. Too many traditionally trained marketers view email in the same ilk as postal mail; we send, we reap, we send, we reap. Email is more personal than that. An entirely different approach has to be used to make email successful. The days of batch-and-blast email campaigns have seen their hay day, consumers and professionals alike are filtering, junking, blocking and marking vast amounts of email as SPAM because they can and it’s easy.
That said, email list attrition and unsubscribed are not just an indication of the health of a list, but a loss of potential revenue and cost of acquisition. Again, email is not free.
Example:
A deployment of 10k emails is distributed to a general list. It garners a revenue of $10k. However; there’s a 1% unsubscribe rate due to whatever reason, cost of acquisition per email address is say, $20 bucks and the hard bounces for this deployment is around 1%.
Before we even count the cost of services, labor, tools etc. Let’s just dissect this.
Revenue - $10,000
Unsubscribe – 100 contacts
Bounces - 100 contacts
(100+100)$20= $4,000
$10,000 – $4,000 = $6,000.
Simple right?
So, we can say that before any tertiary revenue is totaled from the deployment or we add in tools and labor costs. We’re at a 40% difference in revenue. Addressing this cost-per-email is key to measuring the true success of email marketing for your company. Don’t let anyone fool you, the age-old adage that, “nothing is free”, still rings true.
Viva la Email.
