Choosing your Niche… Assess the competition. Initially do some basic searches (maybe using the Google keyword tool & trends.google.com) to see how many people are looking for your product idea. Competition is good, to a certain extent. However, you don’t want to try selling something when there is zero competition because that pretty much means that no one is looking for it.

Colleen Darwent, Affiliate Manager RevenueStreet.com

AffCon brings the affiliate marketing community together – providing the platform for change, sustainability and growth for our industry. AffCon 2010 is designed to ensure the continued success and the long-term viability of the affiliate marketing revenue stream.  By allowing qualified affiliates to attend 2 days of intensive education for free, we have the pulse of the industry at one of the biggest collaborations of the year. Join us at AffCon 2010 in Miami where you will learn how to:

• Maximize your skills for optimal growth
• Find better commission deals and offers
• Explore new products to add to your bottom-line
• Learn new techniques from both new affiliates and super affiliates
• Expand your network with peers, sponsors and industry leaders

Please email marketing@themediacrew.com to setup a meeting.

Thank you

Fortunately, email marketing makes it easy to track your ROI.

Here are three really simple ways to track your ROI:

1. Associate specific products to each email broadcast and track their sales. This allows you to see exactly which emails help sell which products.

2. Embed hyperlinks within your emails that lead users to special landing pages on your web site where users can purchase products. This allows you to track sales specifically arising from the email.

3. Use a hyperlink in your email to connect to your general web site, where you ask customers to fill out a simple form indicating how they heard about you. This allows you to distinguish customers who find you via your emails from those who find you via other means such as search engines.

When you begin tracking your email marketing ROI, keep in mind that, like any advertising, email marketing campaigns may take several efforts to get results. Also consider more than your short-term sales results. Email marketing also serves to boost your customer loyalty, strengthen your branding, and improve new customer acquisition over the long-term.

As you consider ROI metrics, be sure to distinguish between short-term and long-term results.

William (Bill) Michelon Jr. has joined The Media Crew team as a Advertising Manager.  Bill comes from an extensive background in online and affiliate marketing.  Bill worked with Ad Relevancy for nearly 4 years and was responsible for their online media buying as well as managing client relationships and building new ones.  Bill will play a critical roll in solidifying our current advertiser relationships and developing new key relationships with top tier advertisers.  He initially will be working closely with our advertisers and affiliate managers for RevenueStreet and will eventually manage all of our key advertisers for The Media Crew.

Contact Info:

Bill Michelon
Advertising Manager
Bill@TheMediaCrew.com
Office: 727-517-3839
Cell: 941-323-9711
Fax: 727-593-9597
AIM: BillMediaCrew

Welcome to the Crew Bill, we look forward to many successful years ahead!

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Investments:
$35.00 – Average monthly service fee from an email marketing service provider
$100.00 – Contract designers time to create artwork for the email template and landing page (assuming one hour of work)
$25.00 – Marketing manager’s time to craft message, target contacts and send email (assuming one hour of work at a salary of $50,000/year)

Not taking into consideration other intangibles, on a very simple level we could say the investment to send one email blast in a month is $160.

Now we will assume we achieve 100% deliverability and a 30% open rate. This gives us 600 recipients who read our message. Let’s assume our message is compelling enough to garner a 20% click rate sending 120 contacts to a landing page that urges the consumer to purchase our products. The average price of our products is $200 and our average conversion rate for that landing page is 5%.

Of the 120 contacts that go to our landing page, six of them will purchase. At $200 per transaction we achieve $1,200 in revenue.  We spent $160 to create and send our message and received $1,200 in revenue – that’s a return on investment of $7.50 per every dollar spent – pretty darn good.

Why is this important? Our simple example showed demonstrated a successful email marketing campaign. However, not all email campaigns are as effective. When planning email campaigns, there are a number of things we can do that will benefit our outcome:

Target the right consumers.
Ensure that the email list is clean.
Focus on writing relevant content and strong subject lines.
Craft a clear and concise message in the body of the email. Make your brand recognizable.
Create an unmistakable call to action.
Spend time on testing the landing page effectiveness and ease of purchase process.
Receiving a strong open and click rate is important, but if your landing pages cannot convert prospective buyers, you will not achieve a strong ROI. Likewise, if your landing pages convert well, but you are not delivering qualified buyers due to poor targeting and messaging, you will not achieve the results you are seeking. ROI is the big picture metric that determines the overall effectiveness of your campaign.

So, what’s your ROI?

This year TheMediaCrew hosted it’s annual Christmas Party at Maggianos in Tampa.  We had an incredible time.  The food was excellent and the company was even better.  We all enjoyed a ‘dirty santa’ gift exhange which provided some laughs.  We are blessed to have such a great team and we look forward to an even better 2010.  Thank you to all our clients, partners, advertisers and affiliates.  We look forward to working with you in 2010.

By: Ross Moore, Senior Affiliate Manager for RevenueStreet.com