5 Important Metrics You Need To Monitor For Profitable Email Marketing

Think of email marketing as the movies “Avatar” or “Titanic” — they’re the top two highest-grossing films… of all time.

It’s because even though there are new kids on the block (Hi, Marvel fans!) such as social media marketing and influencer marketing, email marketing is still a key player in the growth of your business.

Not yet convinced, are you?

Email marketing has a median ROI of 122% — over 4x higher than other marketing formats including social media, direct mail, and paid search.

Another email fun fact: according to a study by Campaign Monitor, for every $1 you invest on email marketing, you get $44 back in profit!

I can hear you now… “Oh, that’s nice and all, Adii. But those facts & figures don’t really mean anything unless I experience the benefits of email marketing in my own business.”

That’s why today, we’re going to zero in on your email marketing campaign’s profitability.

After all, you’ve spent (a lot of!) time and (how much exactly?) money in this venture.

In this week’s video, we’re going to talk about the five most important metrics that you need to monitor to guarantee that you’ll have a profitable email marketing campaign:

Keep in mind that these metrics are specifically for gauging profitability.

By focusing on these five metrics, you can find out if you need to tweak your email marketing campaign to ensure that the resources you’ve invested are giving you a healthy ROI or not.

Clear?

Cool.

5 Important Metrics You Need To Monitor For Profitable Email Marketing

1. Gross Profit Margin

What it is: Your product’s cost VS your product’s purchase price

How much did it cost you to build your product VS how much will you sell it for?

Here’s why it’s important for profitability — whenever you send an email offering discounts to your customers, if you don’t know your gross profit margin, you can actually make sales…at a loss.

Say what?

If your gross profit margin is 25% and you’re running a discount promotion of 20% off, you’re making only 5% on that sale.

What if you’re offering 30% off but you don’t know your gross profit margin yet?

Knowing your gross profit margin helps you determine if your discount strategy is financially feasible.

2. Average Order Value

What it is: What is the quality of the purchases that a specific email marketing campaign generated?

Compare the Average Order Value of a specific email marketing campaign versus the general Average Order Value of your business so you can find opportunities for improvement during the process.

For example, if you used a discount strategy in your email marketing campaign, you may find that this strategy isn’t as effective when you compare the average order value of this specific email marketing campaign to the general average order value. As such, this can help you consider other strategies to be tested.

3. Conversion Percentage

What it is: The number of prospects joining your mailing list VS percentage of those prospects you convert to first-time customers

There are only two obstacles as to why you haven’t converted them yet:

Abandoned cart: They’re dropping off because they’ve never recovered their abandoned shopping cart; or,
Lack of effort or ineffective email marketing campaign: Either you’re not doing enough to get them to make their first sale; or your campaign’s not effective enough

Naturally, if the number of your prospects is high, but the conversion percentage is extremely low, this means you have no problem getting cold traffic: your weak area is in the email marketing campaign itself.

4. Abandoned Cart Recovery Rate

What it is: How many of your prospects shop around your website and place items in their shopping cart — without actually checking out

Sure, this happens to businesses 70%-80% of the time.

But you lose potential revenue every single time you fail to recover an abandoned cart.

You need to monitor your Abandoned Cart Recovery Rate to:

Make sure it’s not getting out of control: If you have a recovery rate of 5% and below, stop smiling and hoping for the best: you need to do some serious overhaul in your email marketing campaign.
Figure out where in the funnel you need to improve: If your recovery rate decreases, you can determine that the quality of the first part of your funnel has decreased. It’s giving you low-quality leads and unqualified prospects, so you need to work on this.

5. Percentage of Email Marketing-Influenced Revenue

What it is: How much of your total revenue is generated by email marketing

X% VS Cost of Email Marketing Campaign; and,
X% VS Time invested in the Email Marketing Campaign

If you’re investing $2,000/monthly for your email marketing tools and software, and you’re spending a lot of time implementing it, yet you only get $1,000/month email marketing-influenced revenue, you had to be one stubborn cookie if you choose to continue this pattern without changing anything.

Invest eight minutes of your work day watching this video and let me know in the comments what other metrics you think are helpful in ensuring the profitability of your email marketing.

Originally published at conversio.com on August 14, 2018.