We knew our open rates, our click-through rates

[Jahangir655]

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 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 understanding our email marketing efforts and email campaigns. We looked at our open rates and click-through rates. We compared them to others. We tested sending one email per week versus multiple emails per week. We tried different copy. We learned all about email deliverability and staying clear of spam filters.

We experimented with each subject line and reviewed other e-commerce spam database companies' subject lines to learn more. We tested the days of the week and times of day we sent our email campaigns.

We learned everything others were doing to succeed 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.

We had all this data. We knew our open rates, our click-through rates, and our purchase rates. We knew how many people were subscribed to our lists, how many people were unsubscribing, and how many people were being added.