Over the next few weeks, we set out to answer the question
Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2024 5:59 am
So we took a deep breath and looked at what drives our sales. Most companies just don't do that. They have their channels, their budgets, and their sales. And they just don't do the work to understand where their best customers are coming from. We were the same way.
We knew we were getting some sales from SEO. We knew we were getting some referral traffic. We also knew we were getting a few affiliates promoting us. But we didn't know how much each of them was contributing to our sales each day, week, and month.
What made it even more difficult was that we couldn’t predict how much revenue we would make a day, week, or month in advance. This started to create problems with our purchasing. We simply didn’t know how much wine we should take on from our suppliers. Sometimes we would sell 5 cases, and sometimes 50.
So, we chose a channel that we wanted to dive into, and that channel was email marketing for e-commerce. We knew that email campaigns would be useful for us. We knew that email campaigns could be incredibly useful and successful. And as I said, our goal was to tell the stories of the people behind the wines, and we thought email was the best way to do that.
We knew that our e-commerce efforts were helping us build relationships with our customers. But quantifying the financial value of our email marketing efforts was difficult.
We spent 60 days really digging into our email marketing efforts and email campaigns. We looked at our open rates and our click-through rates. We compared them to others. We tested sending one email a week versus multiple emails a week. We tried different copies. We learned all about email deliverability and how to avoid spam filters.
We experimented with each topic and looked at other e-commerce companies' subject lines to see what we could. We tested days of the week and times of day for sending our email campaigns.
We learned everything about what others were doing to succeed in email marketing for e-commerce. We iterated and iterated on our email marketing strategy. What seemed to work one day, didn’t work the next. But we kept moving forward and trying to learn.
Something that was bugging us was that we really needed to have a “North Star Metric” that we could use to be successful in our email efforts. Then one day we were in a meeting and I asked the question, “How much is an email subscriber worth to us?” And no one could answer.
We had all this data. We knew our open rates, our click rates, and our purchase rates. We knew how many people were on our lists, how many people were unsubscribing, and how many people were being added.
We knew so much about email marketing, but we couldn't answer one question: "How much is an email subscriber worth to us?"
Email marketing for eCommerce has evolved significantly since we first started CellarThief. But one thing hasn’t changed in the last decade. Most eCommerce companies still can’t answer a simple question: “How much is an email subscriber worth?” And without that knowledge, scaling an eCommerce email program is difficult, and without a successful eCommerce email program, scaling an eCommerce company is nearly impossible.
So let me go back to my CellarThief story. We were trying uk people whatsapp number to build a great commercial brand, and with little money, we thought the only way to do that was to get even better at our email marketing.
... "How much was an email subscriber worth to us?" At that point, we had about 5,000 email subscribers. These subscribers had signed up to receive offers, and we were growing that number by a few per day. These email subscribers were very interested.
Example of a High Converting E-Commerce Marketing Letter
Our open rates were above 35%. Our click-through rates were above 2.5%, and our purchase rates were stable. We were still tiny, but we had a good set of engaged email subscribers.
We had good customer engagement and good email engagement. We focused on personalized email campaigns based on what we knew about our customers' tastes. We sent out birthday emails because we needed to get birthdays when people ordered alcohol.
We believed that if we could just figure out how much an email subscriber was worth to us, we could afford to buy more email subscribers. If we could do that, our business would be predictable. And the enemy of growth and success in a startup is unpredictability.
Over the next few weeks, we figured out that our average email subscriber was bringing us just under $2.00 in net revenue per month. Again, we were TINY, so we didn't have a lot of revenue per month, but now we had the knowledge. And now we had the potential to scale our business in a predictable way. And now we knew that our best chance to scale was to use eCommerce marketing tactics and best practices to scale.
Armed with how much each subscriber was worth to us, our efforts now had to focus on whether we could get a subscriber for less than they were worth to us. So at that point, it all came down to testing different channels to acquire new subscribers for our emails.
We knew we were getting some sales from SEO. We knew we were getting some referral traffic. We also knew we were getting a few affiliates promoting us. But we didn't know how much each of them was contributing to our sales each day, week, and month.
What made it even more difficult was that we couldn’t predict how much revenue we would make a day, week, or month in advance. This started to create problems with our purchasing. We simply didn’t know how much wine we should take on from our suppliers. Sometimes we would sell 5 cases, and sometimes 50.
So, we chose a channel that we wanted to dive into, and that channel was email marketing for e-commerce. We knew that email campaigns would be useful for us. We knew that email campaigns could be incredibly useful and successful. And as I said, our goal was to tell the stories of the people behind the wines, and we thought email was the best way to do that.
We knew that our e-commerce efforts were helping us build relationships with our customers. But quantifying the financial value of our email marketing efforts was difficult.
We spent 60 days really digging into our email marketing efforts and email campaigns. We looked at our open rates and our click-through rates. We compared them to others. We tested sending one email a week versus multiple emails a week. We tried different copies. We learned all about email deliverability and how to avoid spam filters.
We experimented with each topic and looked at other e-commerce companies' subject lines to see what we could. We tested days of the week and times of day for sending our email campaigns.
We learned everything about what others were doing to succeed in email marketing for e-commerce. We iterated and iterated on our email marketing strategy. What seemed to work one day, didn’t work the next. But we kept moving forward and trying to learn.
Something that was bugging us was that we really needed to have a “North Star Metric” that we could use to be successful in our email efforts. Then one day we were in a meeting and I asked the question, “How much is an email subscriber worth to us?” And no one could answer.
We had all this data. We knew our open rates, our click rates, and our purchase rates. We knew how many people were on our lists, how many people were unsubscribing, and how many people were being added.
We knew so much about email marketing, but we couldn't answer one question: "How much is an email subscriber worth to us?"
Email marketing for eCommerce has evolved significantly since we first started CellarThief. But one thing hasn’t changed in the last decade. Most eCommerce companies still can’t answer a simple question: “How much is an email subscriber worth?” And without that knowledge, scaling an eCommerce email program is difficult, and without a successful eCommerce email program, scaling an eCommerce company is nearly impossible.
So let me go back to my CellarThief story. We were trying uk people whatsapp number to build a great commercial brand, and with little money, we thought the only way to do that was to get even better at our email marketing.
... "How much was an email subscriber worth to us?" At that point, we had about 5,000 email subscribers. These subscribers had signed up to receive offers, and we were growing that number by a few per day. These email subscribers were very interested.
Example of a High Converting E-Commerce Marketing Letter
Our open rates were above 35%. Our click-through rates were above 2.5%, and our purchase rates were stable. We were still tiny, but we had a good set of engaged email subscribers.
We had good customer engagement and good email engagement. We focused on personalized email campaigns based on what we knew about our customers' tastes. We sent out birthday emails because we needed to get birthdays when people ordered alcohol.
We believed that if we could just figure out how much an email subscriber was worth to us, we could afford to buy more email subscribers. If we could do that, our business would be predictable. And the enemy of growth and success in a startup is unpredictability.
Over the next few weeks, we figured out that our average email subscriber was bringing us just under $2.00 in net revenue per month. Again, we were TINY, so we didn't have a lot of revenue per month, but now we had the knowledge. And now we had the potential to scale our business in a predictable way. And now we knew that our best chance to scale was to use eCommerce marketing tactics and best practices to scale.
Armed with how much each subscriber was worth to us, our efforts now had to focus on whether we could get a subscriber for less than they were worth to us. So at that point, it all came down to testing different channels to acquire new subscribers for our emails.