and good email engagement. We focused on personalized phone number list email campaigns based on what we knew about our customers’ tastes. We sent 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 go out and acquire 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
discovered that our average email subscriber was worth just under $2.00 in net revenue per month to us. Again, we were SMALL, so we didn’t have much revenue per month, but a most ordinary story now we had knowledge. And now we had the potential to scale our business predictably. And now we knew that our best chance to scale was to use ecommerce email marketing tricks and best practices to scale.
Armed with what each subscriber was worth to us, our efforts now needed to focus on whether we could earn a subscriber for less than that subscriber was worth to us. So, at that point, it was simply a matter of 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 drive customers, prospects, and email ads.
Most of these tests didn’t work. Some drove almost fresh list zero email subscribers. Others drove email subscribers but at such a high price that we knew we couldn’t optimize that price to a level that would be profitable.
