Email marketing for eCommerce has evolved significantly since we first started CellarThief. But one thing hasn’t changed in the last decade. Most eCommerce companies still can’t answer a simple question: “How much is an email subscriber worth?” And without that knowledge, scaling an eCommerce email program is difficult, and without a successful eCommerce email program, scaling an eCommerce company is nearly impossible.
So let me go back to my CellarThief story. We were trying to build a great commercial brand, and with little money, we thought the only way to do that was to get even better at our email marketing.
Over the next few weeks, we set out to answer the question... "How much was an email subscriber worth to us?" At that point, we had about 5,000 email subscribers. These subscribers had signed up to receive offers, and we were growing that number by a few per day. These email subscribers were very interested.
Example of a High Converting E-Commerce Marketing Letter
Our open rates were above 35%. Our click-through rates were above 2.5%, and our purchase rates were steady. We were still tiny, but we had a good set of engaged email subscribers.
We had good customer engagement and good email engagement. We focused on personalized email campaigns based on what we knew about our customers' tastes. We sent out birthday emails because we needed to get birthdays when people ordered alcohol.
We believed that if we could just figure out how much an email subscriber was worth to us, we could afford to buy more email subscribers. If we could do that, our business would be predictable. And the enemy of growth and success in a startup is unpredictability.
Over the next few weeks, we figured out that our average email subscriber was bringing us just under $2.00 in net revenue per month. Again, we were TINY, so we didn't have a lot of revenue per month, but now we had the knowledge. And now we had the potential to scale our business in a predictable way. And now we knew that our best chance to scale was to use eCommerce marketing tactics and best practices to scale.
Armed with how much each subscriber was worth to us, our efforts now had to focus on whether we could get a subscriber for less than they were worth to us. So at that point, it all came down to testing different channels to acquire new subscribers for our emails.
We tested affiliate channels. We partnered with wine and food blogs and exchanged referral emails. We tested coupons that our customers and website visitors could share with friends. And we started investing small amounts of money in paid acquisition to generate customers, leads, and emails.
Most of these tests didn't work. Some attracted almost zero email subscribers. Some did attract email subscribers, but they did so at such a high cost that we knew we couldn't optimize that price to a level that would be profitable.
But we didn't lose hope and saw glimmers of positive signs. Some channels were either close to breakeven, so we thought we could optimize those efforts to help us become profitable, or were immediately profitable.
but a North Star metric for our business as a whole. We obsessed over this metric, found channels that worked, and began growing our email list rapidly.
Polaris Metric Definition by airfocus
Over time, the business began to grow and became profitable. Eventually, it was acquired uk people whatsapp number by a competitor, given the consolidation and the fact that we were working on a number of other businesses. But the lesson was learned.
Email marketing is critical to the success of an eCommerce company. Everyone knows that. But knowing how much an email subscriber is worth is key to success in email marketing for eCommerce, and almost no eCommerce company knows how much an email subscriber is worth to them.
It’s been over a decade since we launched CellarThief, and we’ve all gone on to do very different things. However, I now help run Hello Bar. Hello Bar is a company that has also been around for over a decade. The platform is used by over 700,000 websites, but some of our most successful clients are e-commerce companies.
Hello Bar - Email Popup Capture Tool for Ecommerce
Many of these companies use Hello Bar in their eCommerce marketing strategy and workflow to attract subscribers. I wish I had used Hello Bar back in the day with CellarThief. It would have made our lives easier and the business much more profitable. I see what Hello Bar does for some of our eCommerce clients and think back to how we would have used it at CellarThief.
I often say that understanding your email metrics can be the difference between success and failure for your online store. So I want to share some thoughts to help tip the scales in your email marketing efforts.
