One of the major portion of any websites marketing efforts is going to be Email Marketing.

MYTH: Email Marketing is free.

The perceived cost of e-mail with online marketers is so low that that it comes close to being free.  This is hardly true.  This perception can be difference between a good email marketing campaign and a bad one.

Email marketers fail to justify investment in database development, analytic skills and tools, and campaign management technologies to help more effectively target and automate e-mail communications.

Here is a simple breakdown of a email campaign.

• The List.
• Email Headline - Catchy enough to prompt open.
• Email Content - call to action (learn more, buy now etc) with auto responders as follow up.
• THE LANDING PAGE - this is very critical.  Most people just send the person to the home page and leave the user to figure what where to go from there.
• Funnel - users to predefined target (sign up, buy now etc).
• Campaign Tracking.

List Management: A good list either 'purchased' or compiled internal is going to cost money and our resources.

Email Headline and Content:  Testing email variations and designing costs money and time.  The most important thing here to realize is that ONE email is NOT going to give you results.  I believe that on average a 'user' needs to SEE your email about 5-6 times to gain 'notoriety'.

The Landing Page: Designing the landing page and funneling users to 'relevant' pages.

Campaign Tracking: If you are not running SPLIT A/B testing, then you are not 'improving'.  This item pretty much encompasses ALL the above steps repeated continuously.
Note: I am sure you have heard this before. What separates the Pros from the Joes?
Testing - if you are not testing, how do you know your 'gut' is on the dot or off by a mile?

So, there you have it.  A very simple breakdown of a decently thought out email campaign.

What is your overall cost for say ONE decent run for say just one month?  Here I am going to give estimates on the very low end just to put things in perspective.

1. List of say 2000 @0.05 per email = $100
2. Email Design for say 10 emails? $200
3. Landing pages and funnel pages (10-20pages?) $200
   (Some pay thousands, yea thousands for just ONE good landing page)
4. Campaign Tracking = $50/month

Total Cost: $550

Sure you can argue that you can design 10 emails and 10 landing pages and it will save you $400.  Thats partly true if you were to complete the Content & Design in say 40 hrs and you make $0 per hr.
 

Now lets do some conversion analysis and review things to track.
Open Rate: Number of people opening your email.
Say 25% open rate emails = 500
Click Thru Rate: Number of people actually clicking in your email to visit your landing page.
Say 15% traffic from your email = 2000*0.15 = 300
Conversion Rate: Percent of people that either reach your goal (subscribe or buy).
Say 3% = So here from the 300 users visiting only 3% buy = 300*0.03 = 9 sales

So, now if you did 10 'emails' with the above % in a month, you have 90 Sales

Cost of product: say $20
Total Revenue = 20*90 = $1800

Bottom line: $1800 revenue for initial marketing cost of $550.
or roughly $1 per marketing get you $3

This does not take into account actual product cost, support etc.

I hope the above example demonstrates that email marketing is not free, but on the other hand its cheap.  Considering after your initial invest met you can 'repeat' the procedure with 'minor' changes or a very long time.

In the next few sections we will discuss some the the venues for email marketing.

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