, see some customers come in, and then two weeks mobile database later the traffic would drop off and we would have to get another media hit. It was tough and it meant our sales were out of our control.
So, we took a deep breath and looked at what was driving our sales. Most companies just don’t do that. They have their channels, they have their budgets, and they have their sales. And they just don’t put in the effort to understand where their best customers are coming from. We were the same.
We knew we were getting
sales from SEO. We knew we were getting referral traffic. We also knew we were getting affiliates to promote us. But we didn’t know how much each of those contributed to our sales each day, week, and month.
More difficult was that we couldn’t predict how tasting this century-old rum much revenue we could achieve any day, week or month ahead. This started to create difficulties with our purchasing. We simply didn’t know how much wine to commit to our suppliers. Some days we would sell 5 cases and other days we would sell 50.
So, we chose a channel to dive into and that channel was email marketing for e-commerce. We knew that email campaigns would be useful for us. We knew that email campaigns can be incredibly rewarding and successful. And, as I said before, our goal was to tell the stories of the people behind the wines and we thought that email was the best way to do that.
Over the next few weeks, we
decided to answer the question… “How much was an fresh list email subscriber worth to us?” At the time we did this, we had about 5,000 email subscribers. These subscribers had signed up for offers, and we were growing that number by a few per day. These email subscribers were highly engaged.
Our open rates were north of 35%. Our click-through rates were over 2.5% and our purchase rates were solid. We were still very small, but we had a good group of engaged email subscribers.
