How To Keep Accurate Email Marketing Records

[bopub]

It is extremely important to keep accurate records in any form of email marketing. It is only through these records that you can determine which ads pull the best, which advertising lead is the most enticing, and how well your product or service is selling.

Good records are the follow-up of good testing!

Keep copies of all ads and conversion material in a spreadsheet or a reliable file. You may also include in that file, or a separate folder, a record of all of the addresses you have used. The separate records per addresses or publication will help you to compare which ads are bringing in the profits.

You may have your own way of filing these ad campaigns. You'll need a separate document for each ad you place. At the top of the document, place the name of the publication the ad appeared in, the issue number or date, the date the issue was placed on sale, the address, the size and cost of the ad, which ad you used, and the price of the product or service. This will be needed to calculate your profits later.

The main body of the document has two main categories -
inquiries and sales.

First, the number of days should be listed in a column at the left. These don't necessarily coincide with the days of the month, rather, start with the first days responses came in.

The subheads under "inquiries" should be:

- Date Received
- Number Received
- Running Total

The subheads under "sales" should be:

- Number of orders received
- Running total
- Cash sales
- Running total for cash sales

These records will help you figure out the responses to ads, orders from sales copy, and how much money you're making.

To calculate the cost per inquiry, divide the cost of the ad into the number of inquiries received.

To find the cost per order, add the total of sending the sales copy to the cost of the ad and divide that by the number of orders received.

The ratio of conversion is the number of orders compared to the number of inquiries. For example, if you get twenty orders from one hundred inquiries, the conversion is twenty percent.

How To Calculate Profit

This is total the amount of cash sales. That is your gross profit. Subtract the cost of the product or service, mailing, conversion of the ad. That is your net profit, the one that counts. Just stick with it and you can watch your profits grow larger with each ad - each conversion - each sale.

How To Segment Your List

Building a email list for your business should be a top priority. It is the most important marketing tool where you can build a mailing list and segment them according to your geographic, demographics,
psychographics and product benefits for your target market.

No email list is ever going to pull as effectively as your own email list created from thousands of prospects that your business will have the opportunity to market to, as well as the hundreds of customers who have tasted or selected or used one or more of your products or services.

Just names and addresses aren't enough. You need to segment your prospective client email list like the big mailing houses do.

The way you do this is ask your clients and prospects their preferences. Why they purchased? Their reading habits? Their spending habits? You could ask them where they heard about you? TV? News? Interent? Radio? Paper? Other?

As soon as they become a customer, you record their purchase whether it was this particular product or that product, this service or that service. Track every purchase, every phone call you make to them, and everything else you've ever talked to them about on your computer.

You need to know how long they've been a customer. Whether they're current on their payments. Whether they respond to an advertisement. What other subsequent purchases they've made? What caused them to make those purchases? Was it a letter you sent, a follow-up? The list goes on, and on.

You want to be able to improve and offer them more things based on the pieces of information you know about them. You can segment your customer file as:

- Calculate the value of your customers. This is the value of every lost name that you don't capture.

- Capture names through registrations, drawings, coupons, free subscriptions, consultations, charge card verifications, and photocopy their checks.

- Design surveys, registrations, etc., to solicit personal information from your customers regarding those variable, important pieces of information for your business.

Of course, testing your campaigns will allow you to clarify and organize many of the foundational procedures and processes of any business. These concepts and processes, though basic and often lost in routine are ones that, if mastered, could potentially bring you immense wealth very quickly.