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.

So we’ve started a series of weekly emails targeted at increasing your Response Rates. Not just your Open Rates, but what does it actually take to get a reader to take action, to click a link, buy a product, etc.?

Our topic for this week is temptation. To illicit a response, you need to Be a Temptress. Entice your readers by tempting them to keep reading on the “other side” of the link. Start sentences, but don’t finish them. Create teaser paragraphs and provide a link to the rest of information. Ask a question and provide the link as the response.

Avoid: Dromophobia is the fear of crossing streets.
Instead, use: Learn what Dromophobia is.
Or use: Did you know there is a phobia of crossing the street? Learn more.
Or use: There’s an old joke about the chicken crossing the road. But did you know that millions of Americans fear that same activity? Learn more.

The trick is to create intrigue. Get someone to click to find more, and you’ll then find new opportunities to interact with your reader.

A few months ago, we looked at a study of email newsletters to see what readers were generally interested in. Over time, we found that terms that included or were related to business planning garnered a significantly higher open rate than other terms. Even when we thought that readers interested in business planning would be interested in other business related topics, such as lead generation, our results proved otherwise. Example:

Notice the pattern. Every time the subject line includes terms like “planning”, “strategy”, or “goal” – all related to business plans – the open rate is over 30%. The moment we deviate and include other terms that we think people might respond to, like “competition” or “generating leads,” the open rate drops below 30%.

Look at the last two subject lines. There is a 10% increase in the open rate for the one about our 2008 Business Planning Guide compared to our information on Generating New Leads.

These numbers make it clear: readers want information to help them set goals and write a business plan. The insightful point is how connected our readers are with terms related to business planning, strategy, and goal setting. These terms are our audience’s hot buttons.

So what are your readers’ hot buttons? You can find out by looking through your campaign statistics. For your campaigns with higher open rates, what do those campaigns have in common? Look at everything, from which list you used and the source of that list (readers that opted in on your web site will give you a higher open rate than a purchased third party opt-in list), to the day or even time of day the campaign was sent, news going on in your industry or in the industries of your readers. Knowledge is power. Stay informed with how your campaigns are performing, and you’ll make better decisions about future campaigns.

Several clients have approached me recently with questions about some of the basics of marketing via permission-based email newsletters, and rather than re-create the message from scratch each time, I’m posting the information here. For the next several weeks, I’m going to post parts in a series about Developing an Email Marketing Strategy. After that, I’ll be back to our usual drivel, I promise!

Determine Your Audience. More than likely, you’re already familiar with your target market — those prospects who make you smile most, when they convert to actual clients. But for many businesses who are marketing via email, your target market may not be the exact market that will open and read your email messages. Busy professionals, for instance, may receive more than a hundred emails in a day, and — nothing personal, but your message doesn’t possess the same urgency that others in an inbox might.

While this doesn’t mean that you should not communicate to that market, you should rather a little time thinking about what will make that target client stop and read. What will come across as relevant? What will come across as urgent? It’s often the urgent, and always the relevant, that gets the best read.

A well-planned campaign will be well worth the forethought.

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.

Consumers typically aren’t motivated with large amounts of information. They purchase products based on the vision of that product applied. If someone can imagine themselves using your product, and it helps them, serves them in some way, or helps them accomplish what they need to accomplish, they’re sold. Be careful not to show too many products, offers or specials. Simple gets your point across clearly. Feature a few products across multiple categories or price ranges, and your subscribers will immediately understand your message.