In previous blog posts, we’ve emphasized the importance of email marketing and how it can grow your business. Since then, we created a worksheet that is going to help you achieve your email marketing goals. Our email strategy worksheet will allow you to see the growth potential of your revenue, website traffic, and other metrics using email marketing.
First, we want to remind you the importance of email marketing. Email marketing is still one of the most effective and cost-efficient forms of internet marketing. With 2.5 billion users, there’s a tremendous opportunity for business owners to connect with customers. By increasing subscribers and your click-through rate, you’ll start to have a better conversion rate, which will drive sales.
The best way to achieve your business objectives is to visualize them. The purpose of this tool is to demonstrate the effectiveness of email marketing and to help you plan ahead for the future. By utilizing this worksheet, you’ll get a better understanding of what you need to do in order to achieve email marketing success. Let’s dive into detail. First, download the worksheet using this form. Then continue on with the how-to instructions below!
The three columns we’ll be using are “your goals”, “your current status”, and “industry averages”. If you have access to industry averages, you can insert them in the middle row for comparison. To get started, enter the amount of email subscribers that you currently have in cell D4 along with the number of subscribers you want to achieve in B4.
Move down a row and you’ll want to input the percentage of people who are opening your emails today. Move over to B5 where you’ll put in the desired email open rate. The next variable that gets analyzed is your click-through rate. Just like before, enter your current click-through rate in D6, then move over to B6 where you’ll input the click-through rate you desire.
The next row is important and we’ll tell you why. It is the frequency of emails you send each month. Getting your message into the mailbox of your prospective customers more frequently is the key to ramping up your traffic and sales. In D7, you are going to say how many emails are currently being sent each month and in B7 how many emails you are willing to send each month. You’ll notice the increase in traffic right away.
Now that we have an idea on how to improve traffic, let’s see what it’ll do for revenue and sales. Insert the conversation rate you currently have in cell D9 and then put your conversation rate goal in B9. Your average order size will go in D11 and your current annual revenue will go in the cell below. Your conversion rate is available in your commerce software or, if you’re B2B, it’s your sales conversion percentage from first inquiry to sale.
The best part of email isn’t just that you close to customers, it’s that you have the opportunity to convert and nurture prospects to customers to evangelists, too. So while we are looking at sales conversions, you also have a greater percentage of stranger-to-prospect (subscriber) conversion happening too, at the same time.
After putting in all of the metrics, the picture starts to come together. You can analyze where you need improvement and how to achieve it. We recommend playing around with the numbers to get a few different perspectives on what you can do to achieve email marketing success. By taking advantage of the email strategy worksheet, you’ll be laying the foundation for a successful email marketing year.
Now that you have a basic understanding of how this tool works, play around with it and make a renewed commitment to email marketing. For more on email marketing conversion tips, check out our blog posts on writing emails that convert here and on creating successful email campaigns here.
