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.

Come by our booth # 503 & listen to our COO Rustam Irani speak  on “Negotiation for the Best CPA and RevShare Models.”

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This is by far the worst mistake made by companies that offer affiliate programs. I often see companies for products I am trying to promote compete with me in the search engine rankings and pay per click advertising programs.

Why companies invest money and resources in competing with their affiliates is beyond me. By competing with me, you’re trying to put me out of business. Have marketing directors ever thought of it in that way? Because if you succeed, you will no longer have an affiliate network to speak of.

The money would be better spent on supporting your affiliate network by creating a better product, providing more referral statistics, higher commission payouts, faster support, and more, fresh promotional creatives.

2. Not Providing Your Affiliates With Useful, Real-Time Statistics.

All marketers rely on statistics to measure the effectiveness of any marketing campaign. Yet most affiliate programs only provide their affiliates with basic statistics such as number of visitors sent, number of sales, and commission earned. These statistics aren’t much help to affiliates who want to measure the effectiveness of a particular pay per click campaign.

3. Not Compensating Your Affiliates Fairly For Their Hard Work.

The #1 incentive for any affiliate is cold hard cash. Money sells! So tell your marketing director to fire the search engine optimization firm and advertising department, and redirect the resources to paying your affiliates a higher commission rate.

4. Not Providing Enough Fresh Promotional Creatives.

Most affiliate managers seem to give their promotional creatives little thought. All they offer is a handful of 468×60 banners, buttons and text links. What happens is that affiliates end up using the same ads on hundreds, even thousands of web sites.

5. Not Providing Fast, Quality Support For Your Affiliates.

This is the 21st century. Don’t make your affiliates wait longer for an email reply than it takes to send a letter by snail-mail post.

Don’t outsource your affiliate support work. If you have to, then at least train your support staff so that they understand the ins and outs of your products and affiliate program. I’m often dumbfounded by affiliate support staff who can’t give me answers to simple questions.