At the time, we simply couldn’t afford paid acquisition channels. These channels were much more affordable at the time, but our margins were slim… and, did I mention, we were self-sufficient?! So we had to find a channel that would allow us at the time to build relationships with our customers and generate consistent, consistent sales.
We received excellent media coverage
And were even named one of the top 100 retailers by Internet Retailer . This media coverage was excellent, but it was also fleeting.
We’d get a media hit, we’d see customers phone number library coming in, then two weeks later, traffic would drop off and we’d have to go get another media hit. It was difficult and meant our sales were out of our control.
So we took a deep breath and examined what was driving our sales. Most companies simply don’t do that. They have their channels, their budgets, and their sales. And they simply don’t do the work necessary to understand where their best customers are coming from. We were the same.
We knew we were getting sales from SEO. We at the time knew we were getting referral traffic. We also knew we were getting affiliates to promote us. But we didn’t know how much each of them was contributing to our sales every day, every week, and every month.
The most difficult thing
Was that we couldn’t predict how much revenue we could generate in a day, a week, or a month. This began to create difficulties for our purchasing. We simply didn’t know how much wine to commit to supplying to our suppliers. Some days we sold 5 cases and other days 50.
So we chose one channel to focus on, and that technical errors on your site channel was e-commerce email marketing. We knew email campaigns would be beneficial for us. We knew email campaigns can be incredibly rewarding and successful. And, as I said before, our goal was to tell the story of the people behind the wines, and we felt email was the best way to do that.
We knew our email marketing efforts were helping us build relationships with our customers. However, it was difficult to quantify the financial value of our email marketing efforts.
We spent 60 days really
UInderstanding our email marketing efforts and email campaigns. We looked at our open rates and click-through rates. We compared them to others.
We experimented with each subject line and united states business directory reviewed other e-commerce companies’ subject lines to learn more.
In e-commerce email marketing. We developed and redesigned our email marketing strategy. What seemed to work one day wouldn’t work the next. But we kept moving forward and trying to learn.
We kept thinking that we absolutely needed a “North Star” metric we could use to make our email efforts successful. Then one day we were in a meeting and I asked the question, “What is the value of an email subscriber to us?” And no one had an answer.
