Your email campaigns should be resulting in revenue, and even better, profit! So how can you tell how profitable your email campaigns are? Here are some quick and easy formulas:

Revenue Per Email: Every email address on your list is worth a particular dollar amount per year. To calculate your RPE (Revenue per Email), use the following formula:

Total annual sales resulting from email campaigns / number of email addresses sent = RPE

Calculating Lost Revenue: To find out how much attrition is impacting your revenue growth, use the following formula:

(Number of email addresses that unsubscribe or bounce) x (RPE) = Lost Revenue

Now the question: are you tracking your profitability? It’s easier for some people to track profitability than it is for others (based on whether you’re selling something via your email campaigns, or whether you’re solely building rapport), but email marketing is truly an effective and profitable method for establishing your brand.

Best wishes, and Happy Marketing.

The next tip in our “Ways to Increase Your Response Rates” series is to not obfuscate your links. Huh? That’s what I said, too. Simply put, if you have any control whatsoever on the way the URL that you’re linking to, reads, make it simple. Still wondering what I’m talking about? Here’s an example:

BAD: “http://www.xyzsite.com/newsletter/2008/e/a/article/sales2.asp”
BETTER: “http://www.xyzsite.com/Money-Saving-Coupon”

The concept is simple. Actually, the concept is simplicity. If you use URL’s that are long and deep, your reader’s eyes will tend to skip over the URL, because it looks like a jumbled mess. Instead, use something that is short and sweet, with clear benefits that will help reinforce the value of what’s on the other side of the link (Remember our article two weeks ago about enticing the reader?).

Now here’s something: What if you don’t have control of your site structure (the URL)? Here’s a simple way to bypass it: go to bit.ly and create a URL that points to the URL you actually want. A side benefit: bit.ly will actually track the people who visit your links. But you don’t need that, when you consider Online Outbox’s statistics, do you?

Building on the your target audience, and your purpose in contacting them, it’s now time to craft your message. Your purpose will drive your content.

For instance, if your purpose is to get readers to your web site, you should offer some “teaser” content: maybe it’s a headline, or the first three lines of a recent article on your site. Something that will grab the reader’s attention, and entice them to take further action. Then follow that teaser with a link to a specific page with that entire article. If, rather, your purpose in contacting your readership is to sell product, your content will need to be crafted in that direction.

The concept is not difficult to grasp, but starting with an analysis of your audience and your purpose will make crafting your message much more direct, and the more direct your messaging, the greater the impact of your marketing.

Determine Your Purpose. After becoming familiar with your audience (see our last post), you’ll want to nail down your purpose for writing. Whittle your purpose down to one goal: Entice the reader to visit your web site. Buy something advertised in your email. Heighten community impact. Make your group aware of certain news or events. Your purpose may be completely unique, but you need to know what it is, in order to market effectively.

This post is a continuation from my thought last week: that while the typical salesperson gives up too soon, his prospect is typically ready to buy tomorrow (80%, to put a number to it). The magic number is 7 impressions. It takes the typical person 7 impressions before they buy.

Granted, none of us are typical. But I suppose the stats apply to the median of the whole at large.

The point I’d like to make here is that you can’t send an email blast and expect your prospects to come running. I advocate pushing your products and services to the same contact over a period of several months. Don’t just send the same message each week. Change it up. Highlight different features. Create targeted landing pages on your web site that will convert better than just sending prospects to your home page. Keep it simple, but over a month or two, your target client should have a good idea of what it is you sell, and what it could do for them.

Then they still won’t buy. But one day, when they come across a need that specifically relates to them, your product or service will be fresh in their mind.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, every dollar you spend on email marketing will generate a $45.06 return on investment. This is the highest response rate provided by any direct response method. When compared to postal mail or other direct marketing pieces, the barrier to entry is extremely affordable.

Of course, that figure is an average spread across many industries, some of which get a much higher rate of return, and some, such as non-profit or government organizations, which use email for a purpose other than a direct return of revenue.

Whatever the purpose of your organization, the statistic from the DMA is a resounding plug for spreading your message with email.

Personalization of your content can do wonders for your readership. Address your readers by name, where appropriate. Include their industry, age, gender, shoe size — whatever information is relevant, and will demonstrate an attention to detail that resonates with your readers. Online Outbox provides Custom Fields for this very purpose.

Further segmenting your content based on will allow you to further customize your messages to the specific circumstances of each of your readers. For instance, it may be beneficial to send an entirely different message to a group of industrial printers than to a group of real estate agents. You could create separate contact lists altogether, or simply segment those lists as you prepare to send your messages.

Great post from the experts at the Email Experience Council and our friends at Marketing Profs. Testing is the key to getting results. The concept they push here, A/B split testing, is one of the latest features of Online Outbox. Split testing allows a marketer to get a true litmus of the effectiveness of a campaign. Here goes:

“A great way to capitalize on the democratic medium of email is to put your burning questions, late-night hunches, and out-of-the-box ideas to the test with an A/B split test,” says Megan Walsh in a post at the Email Experience Council blog. Here’s some of her advice for using split testing to try out new ideas and boost results:

Focus on one variable at a time. When testing subject lines, for instance, you want to know how many subscribers opened the message. Clicks and conversions, meanwhile, matter when you’re testing calls to action. Remember that a change in one variable can have an impact on another. Always be clear about what you’re trying to test/achieve, Walsh advises.

Use a random distribution for A and B audience groups. “The sizes of the segments don’t need to be the same if the key metric you are looking to influence is expressed as a ‘rate,’” she says, “but they do need to have the same general characteristics to be a fair test.”

Take it to the next level. As you become a testing junkie, begin to explore how different segments behave. Williams-Sonoma knew that including a featured product’s price on the hero image boosted clicks and conversions. The company recently discovered, however, that the customers driving this response were those who spent more than $100 on an average purchase; customers who spent less were more likely to click on an image without a price.

The Po!nt: Never stop testing. Something that works today won’t necessarily work tomorrow: customer preferences constantly vary.

One advantage of using Split Testing with Online Outbox is that you’re not limited to a single split. In other words, you’re not limited to A/B — you could segment and test A/B/C/D… or more, but you get the idea… Get more info on Split Testing here.

Sending an email to your subscribers on the same day, at the same time, has a positive effect. For example, every Wednesday at 10am. Your subscribers will come to “expect” your email to arrive in their inbox on the same day at the same time every week, meaning that they expect to receive your content and are generally more receptive to any special offers or promotions you may include. After all, who likes surprises on a Wednesday morning?

Free is overused these days, especially in email marketing. However, if you’re looking to grow your subscriber list, then create or source a product of value to your visitors (such as an e-book or discount coupon) and offer it to them for free when they signup for to receive your newsletter. Often, these can be free to you, but provide a legitimate value to your subscribers.

To make sure users don’t simply type any email address into your subscription form, setup an Autoresponder to send them the free bonus immediately after they subscribe. Get more help with Autoresponders here.