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How to Calculate Your Brand’s Revenue Per Email Send

A group of people working on calculating revenue using email.

Let’s talk about email.

The once darling channel of marketers and consumers alike has unfortunately earned a bad rep due to some sketchy marketing tactics (hello batch-and-blast). But despite this, when done right, email is still one of the most powerful ways to reach consumers.

Consider the following statistics:

  • The ROI for email marketing averages at 3,800%, or an average of $38 return for every invested dollar 
  • Marketers who send personalized, segmented email marketing campaigns can see up to 52X ROI

Most marketers will claim to use their email list for good, sending only highly relevant emails to their customers that boost engagement. But are you sure that your emails are making a real impact?

There are many KPIs you can measure, but open rates and click-through rates are really just vanity metrics. To truly understand the success of your brand’s email marketing, you must measure true conversion rates through revenue per email send. This is a fantastic way to measure whether your marketing messages and email program actually make an impact on the bottom line for your B2C business.

How to calculate revenue per email

The equation to determine revenue per send is simple:

Total revenue generated by email campaign/Total number of emails successfully delivered

Calculating the number of emails successfully delivered means making sure you remove any bounced or permanently failed emails. That’s easy enough. But while this equation looks simple, it’s a bit more complicated than it seems. How do you know how much revenue was truly generated by your email campaign?

Think about how the average consumer engages with a brand these days. The path to purchase isn’t linear. Often, your buyers engage with you across multiple channels  — email, app, social media — before they make a purchase.

In order to get the full picture of customer engagement, you need to know your customer and track their behavior across all the different channels they engage with you on. We call this resolving the buyer’s identity.

Once you have a 360-degree view of your customer, you can really start to understand the impact of your email campaigns. You can see whether that customer first followed you in Instagram, then clicked an ad, and later signed up for your emails which led to the final conversion. In that case, your email was certainly part of the successful campaign, but shouldn’t get 100% credit.

The importance of multi-touch attribution

Instead of just looking at whether an email led directly to a new sale, you should apply a multi-touch attribution approach.

Multi-touch attribution uses a weighted approach to allocating credit across any channels a user engages with during their buyer journey. It takes into consideration how all of your various marketing campaigns and channels work together to influence a sale.

For example, if a customer is part of an email nurture campaign and converts on the third email you send, does that mean the first two emails had no impact? Using a single-touch attribution approach, that would be the case. But if we can see that the customer engaged with all three emails then why shouldn’t the other two get some credit for influencing the purchase?

Multi-touch attribution is a much more accurate way to understand how various emails (or marketing channels) work together to generate revenue. It takes into consideration what we already know: there is a nurturing journey that happens with each customer and it happens over multiple touches, not just one.

Using a weighted multi-touch attribution model, you can figure out a more accurate representation of the dollar amount each email has truly brought in for your brand.

Move beyond vanity metrics and get personal

Now that you can properly attribute the true amount of revenue to your emails, you can go back to your revenue per email equation. With a more accurate number, you can better guide your marketing decisions. By understanding the true ROI of your emails, you’ve moved beyond vanity metrics like open and click rates to truly understand the impact of your campaigns. From there, you can work on optimization and A/B test your email messages and subject lines to improve them even more.

The data you rely on to calculate what your revenue per email send is can also be used to create better, more personalized email campaigns. Let’s face it. Email is a cluttered channel today. Only the emails that stand out to consumers stand a chance at getting viewed — even if they opt in. But when you create emails that are personalized according to buyer behavior, you can generate major revenue.

In fact, when we analyzed the average revenue per send for Zaius customers, we found:

  • Non-personalized, non-behavioral campaigns, generate just $0.26 in revenue-per-send
  • Personalized, behavioral campaigns, generate a massive $13.62 revenue-per-send

While this is just one of many marketing metrics you should track, it can be incredibly powerful. If you’re looking to improve the return on investment for your email marketing, revenue per email is the metric you need.

Want to get a full picture of customer interactions so that you can start calculating revenue per email send today? Check this out.

This article was originally published by our friends at Zaius.

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