Email Marketing Statistics – And How To Use It To Get Ahead In Business
In a rapidly evolving medium like the Internet, the only constant is change. With email marketing, you must plan for change and then adapt to it quickly. Email marketing statistics can help you keep track of developments and to stay ahead constantly.
Setting Targets and Monitoring Progress
Email marketing statistics center around some easily measured metrics to assess progress.
The most essential number is your count of people on your list of email addresses. It is a measure of your promotional and marketing efforts. A steady, if slow, growth curve is heartening news.
Another one of the email marketing statistics to monitor is the percentage of your readership that ‘unsubscribes’ or discontinues receiving your e-zine. This is an index of the ‘utility value’ of your e-zine and reflects your skill with relationship marketing.
A high quality e-zine that practices permission marketing best practices and consistently provides useful information will have a very low rate of removal requests.
A third is the revenue generated from your email newsletter.
Mapping Future Direction
Whenever necessary, you must be able to change direction quickly. At the same time, frequent modifications can make you look indecisive and unprofessional. Try not to make major alterations to your email marketing strategy more often than every six months.
How do you decide about change?
1. Ask your reader. In every issue, make sure to request feedback and
suggestions from your subscribers. Take note of issues that crop up often. Run brand marketing surveys and study the responses carefully.
2. Talk to fellow publishers. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Email marketing tips from experienced veterans might help with valuable ideas, caution you against pitfalls and teach you some neat tricks.
3. Study the competition. Look for other email marketing examples in your niche. See what people are doing, the direction they are taking, the content that works for them. Imitation isn’t only the best form of flattery – it also works.
Harness Your Email Marketing Statistics To Your Strategy
Step 1: Set targets for readership, removals and revenues
Keep track of these important email marketing statistics. Target subscriber count – either per issue, or per month, or per quarter. It might be a fixed number, or a percentage of your existing subscriber base e.g. you could decide to target a growth rate of X % per issue.
Record your unsubscribe count, and map it against the size of your opt in mailing list from time to time. Also track revenue generated from your email marketing efforts at regular intervals of time.
Step 2: Monitor progress
Draw a table on a sheet of paper (or create a spreadsheet using a program like MS Office). Periodically (once every week or month), record the number of subscribers you have. On another chart, record the un-subscribe requests.
Step 3: Plan Future Direction
• Every month (or quarter), take a critical look at the progress you’ve made.
• Decide upon future trends, re-fix targets and make alterations to your email marketing strategy.
• Be bold. Don’t hesitate to experiment. After all, if it doesn’t work, you can revert to the previous model!
Email Marketing Statistics To Track Closely
What are the most important numbers you need to track with email marketing?
– Subscriber acquisition rate
– Subscriber acquisition cost
– Average dollars earned per subscriber
– Subscriber longevity
– Subscriber attrition rate
There are many other metrics you could (and sometimes should) measure, but these 5 are critical to monitor on an ongoing basis if you want your list to grow, and be profitable.
Subscriber Acquisition Rate
This is the number of new subscribers you acquire over a specific time frame e.g. per month or per week.
It is a measure of your marketing effectiveness. Ideally, you will have systems in place that will ensure your acquisition rate is constantly improving.
Subscriber Acquisition Cost
This number is particularly important when taken together with the ‘dollars earned’ figure, because it allows you to make an intelligent and informed budget allocation for list building.
In a very simple way, you can calculate this value by dividing the cost of your
marketing efforts by the total number of new subscribers acquired over the same time frame.
Average dollars earned per subscriber
Another important figure to understand is your ‘profit per subscriber’. Failure to analyze this number is the reason for perpetuating the myth about list size – ‘Bigger is better’.
If you track promotions and advertisements sent to your ezine and mailing list separately, you will be able to compute how much your list subscribers bought, and know your total dollar value per month (or week, or year) for your list.
Subscriber Longevity
A variable that will help you make more sense of the average dollar value of your subscriber is the longevity of your average subscriber – the duration of time they stay subscribed to your list.
Subscriber Attrition Rate
This is the figure every list owner dreads, because in a very direct way, it is a vote on your ezine’s performance. Delight your readers and they will stay with you longer. Irritate or annoy them, or worse, offer them little or no value, and they will vote by leaving your list.
Measure and closely monitor your unsubscribe rates. You may set a target figure for each time period, and make it an absolute number (“I want less than 25 cancellations next month”) or link it to your list size (“I will keep my cancellation rate less than 2% of my current list size”)
Now that you know the 5 important email marketing statistics that are critical to keep track of your growth, you should set targets for readership, removals and revenues even while formulating your email marketing strategy.
Then monitor your progress by periodically reviewing your email marketing statistics for the latest period, and comparing it against older data to see if you’re getting steadily better.
Use email marketing statistics to plan your future direction.
Every month (or quarter), take a critical look at the progress you’ve made. Decide upon future trends, re-fix targets and make strategic alterations. Be bold. Don’t hesitate to experiment. After all, if it doesn’t work, you can revert to the previous model!
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