When you are evaluating list acquisition methods for your email program an important factor to the success of your program to measure is your list’s financial performance. We should look not only at the quantity of our list, but also the quality of our list. There are two metrics that are important to understanding the quality of your list – Cost per Response (CPR), often-called Cost to Acquire and Lifetime Value (LTV). These two metrics are the key to understanding the value of the list you are building and help you to acquire high quality customers in the email channel. You may find that using List Rentals gives you a good conversion rate, but the corresponding cost to acquire them does not allow you to recoup those expenses in a short enough time frame to make it pay out. Lifetime Value calculations tell you how much each of your subscribers is worth. When totaled they will show you what your list is worth.

There is more pressure on marketers than ever to increase revenues and drive ROI out of their email program, these metrics will help you tell which list acquisition method gives you the highest value customers at the lowest cost so you can drive the highest ROI out of your email program. Tracking these metrics, in addition to your list acquisition rates, allows you to project the cost to grow our list to a specific goal (i.e. 20% growth). CPR and LTV can also be used to find the list size you would need to reach a specific financial objective. For those looking to make a case for additional resources for the email program being able to show the full value of the program as an asset is very effective argument.

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MailChimp is an email service provider that is intuitive and low-cost. I have tried out MailChimp for the past few months and find it to be a solid value. I was skeptical at first, since they do not offer live support, but the live chat really has produced a live person every time I used it, typically within a few minutes and the support was great. Their site also has a very good blog and user community, as well as a sense of humor. This makes using them fun and often brings a smile to my face during my day. During our RFP process, MailChimp beat the pricing against the other major Tier 1 providers we spoke with.

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For our recent vendor move, I tried several ESPs, one of which is CampaignerPro. They offered low prices, an easy to use interface and interesting trigger email tool CampaignerPro is among the low cost providers that make up the so called “Tier 1” group.

There are a few common limitations that most of the companies that fall into this category have such as not allowing role based addresses. Typically Tier 1 providers do not have as robust a database system for list management and segmentation as higher level tier providers. Many also have some limits to the number of fields provided or field types. There may be hurdles to moving your program to the new system with list imports or list structure.

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Earlier this month I took my wife to see a Depeche Mode concert for our anniversary and we’ve been listening to them a lot more ever since. Along the way two songs stuck with me where “Just Can’t Get Enough” and “Everything Counts.” It surprised me how much these two songs can teach us about email.

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Digital marketing communications are ever evolving and growing.  Search, Email and Social have risen to become the Digital Marketing Trifecta. Each plays a unique and collaborative role in marketing via digital mediums and internet- based sales channels. Each of these mediums has its strengths and weaknesses and is best suited towards different goals. When used collaboratively these three forms of digital marketing create a storm of synergy that most other mediums simply cannot match. They can take your marketing programs to new levels of ROI, revenue and lead generation and unparalleled success. Used poorly, these three can break your business – permanently. So before you start that blog, twitter account or email program – PLAN. Three questions you should ask before starting any of these programs: Continue reading…