Among the various marketing channels at a brands’ disposal, email marketing still delivers one of the best returns on investments. Tracking revenue tied to email marketing allows marketers to validate a campaigns’ effectiveness and make needed improvements and maintenance. Here are five ways to measure revenue gained from email marketing:
Click-through sales
When a subscriber opens an email, clicks through to a landing page, and purchases all in one sitting, email marketers can easily track revenue and the path taken to get there. The benefit of this method is that it immediately tracks a sale. Unfortunately, these stats don’t always tell the whole picture about the power of emails depending on a user’s full purchase path. For example, a potential buyer may click through to your website with the intent of buying but gets distracted. If that same user finds their way back to your website later through a search engine, the behavior would credit the search engine and not your email. But while measuring impact from click-through sales can often be complex, it’s still a valuable tool for measuring a portion of total revenue.
Offer code redemptions
Tracking promotion codes is one of the easiest ways to assess revenue from email marketing. However, there is lots of room for error when just looking at these results. Nowadays, email-only offers are leaked across the internet via coupon sites, social media platforms, and even word of mouth, which overly inflates the impact of email.
A/B testing
Regular testing is critical across all areas of your email marketing campaigns because it functions as a barometer for what is working and what is not. To determine if your current email marketing strategy is working and driving revenue, establish a random sample of recipients that does not receive an email offer when a test group does. After a set period, compare the revenue generated from each group to see if there is a sizable difference. This can be repeated with different elements of your email. Because there are some unknown and uncontrollable variables on the subscriber side, marketers can make conclusions about what boosts revenue when looking at large quantities of data over time as opposed to short-term, individual results.
Match-back analysis
Measuring revenue from match-back analysis is one of the few tracking methods that does not require web analytics. Instead, results are determined by looking at sales generated from a certain timeframe after an email campaign was deployed versus all email recipients. Unfortunately, while in many cases this method is fairly accurate, it doesn’t account for people who made a purchase but not necessarily because of the email, but because they happened to be shopping at the right place at the right time.
Revenue per subscriber
Sometimes looking at email marketing on a more granular level can help brands piece together the larger picture. Grouping together subscribers into purchasing buckets–frequent, occasional, and almost never–allows marketers to hypothesize about what might be working and driving revenue, and where there may be room for improvement depending on how the groups have interacted with emails before.
Email marketing is a great revenue driver for all businesses when utilized correctly. Stay on top of tracking revenue to provide valuable data that can direct future email campaigns and help keep your strategy on track. Let ResponseGenius help take your email marketing to the next level – hello@responsegenius.com
