Does Your Email Campaign Generate A 2,170% R.O.I.?
“The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales.” – Claude Hopkins, “Scientific Advertising”
Would you invest $350 in an email marketing campaign for a $7,595 return on that investment? The answer is obvious! The graph below references a Google Analytics snapshot from one of our client’s recent email campaigns. And this figure only represents online orders, it doesn’t account for any additional orders that were completed by phone!
It’s widely touted that email marketing produces some of the highest R.O.I. of any online marketing channel. One statistic that is frequently referenced is, “Email R.O.I. per $1 spent equals $51.45″ (Source: Direct Marketing Association Power of Direct report October 2006). While, that sure sounds nice, it doesn’t mean much when it comes to measuring the effectiveness and value of your email marketing program.
Do you know exactly how many visits, leads, conversions, and sales are generated from your email campaigns? Can you accurately measure your return-on-investment? If your answer to these questions is no, then it’s time to integrate Google Analytics into your email marketing program.
A basic Google Analytics installation into your website and your email campaigns is easy to do. Not only will you have a more complete picture of how your site visitors are interacting with your site, but you’ll also have a clearer understanding of how your email programs compare to your other online marketing initiatives such as your Search Engine Marketing efforts. Establishing revenue goals for leads gained from form completions is easy to do. If your site includes an eCommerce component, then enabling eCommerce tracking within your GA account is a must.
Use the Google Analytics URL Builder to add a custom tag to every link with your email campaign that goes back to your site. Keep the “source” and “medium” consistent, but update the “campaign” variable with each send. In this way, you’ll easily be able to see which campaigns worked and which ones failed.
With every email campaign you should always be testing new ideas to find out what really works with your audience. Taking a scientific approach to your email marketing will not only help you improve each campaign’s effectiveness, but also help you create a road map of what works for future campaigns, and will help you make the case for allocating more of your marketing budget to your most productive marketing channels.
Remember, the ultimate goal is to measure the true R.O.I. for each email campaign, as well as for your email program as a whole. You’ll be able to measure revenue generated, average value per visitor, goals completed, conversion rate, and eCommerce transactions.
So whether you’re new to email marketing or have a current email marketing program in place – contact us today to take it to the next level, and remove the guess-work from your email marketing program!
- Josh Lewis & Ryan Austin
September 19th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Wow – What a great illustration as to how tracking ROI is so easy for emarketing! Nice Post!
January 17th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
I got here by clicking though Eric’s post. the 1 -2 punch is really effective. I am going to forward this onto a few company owners that need to understand how measurable these projects are. Thanks!