Yes, those are both very important. Of course someone has to open the email and click to our site. But the real value is realized only when that person takes the desired action once arriving – for example they purchase a CD or a digital download.

To illustrate this point, I invite you to take a look at this case study of two emails that were both pretty effective in driving clicks to an artist’s store page, but the test email designed by Kadlec Consulting delivered significantly higher results from those clicks.

In order to fully show you the power of this concept, I’m going to take actual percentages from an email campaign and apply them to three scenarios of traffic going to the site.

Clicks to the landing page:
100
1,000
10,000

In the actual test, there were two purchase links on the landing page – one for a CD and one for a digital download. To keep the math straight forward, let’s say the CD earns us $10.00 and the digital download earns $7.00.

In the actual case, we looked at how many clicks there were vs. the total amount of emails that were sent to first get a picture of which email was better at driving traffic to the store page. In the case, the difference in clicks was small enough to safely say both emails were equally effective in driving traffic to the store page.**

Where the emails differed was in what happened next:

Control Email: .68% clicked to buy the album
.68% clicked to buy the download

Test email: 4.17% clicked to buy the album
0% clicked for the download

Let’s look at how this plays out in potential revenue gain*:
Control     Test
@100 clicks:      $11.56        $     41.70
@1,1000 clicks: $115.60     $   417
@10,000 clicks: $1,156       $4,170

This comparison shows how an email that connects with fans can deliver four times more revenue, and also shows how that scales. More emails in the database means more clicks to your site.

But what was the secret sauce that went into the test email? The test email presented the artist’s CD to the fan as a benefit by showing how playing that CD could be solution to a problem the band’s demographic would likely experience on a daily basis.

If you’d like to know how Kadlec Consulting can deliver this kind of creative marketing to your campaigns – please <a href=”http://www.jasonkadlec.com/category/contact/”>Click Here</a> to contact me.

*Here is the breakdown of the math:
Control:
100 * .68%= .68 * $10 album = $6.8
100 * .68%= .68 * $7 download = $4.76
Total = $11.56

Test:
100 * 4.17% = 4.17 * $10 = $41.70

(warning this gets nerdy from here on out…)

**The actual open rates in campaigns vary not just by how appealing your subject line is but also by how your list was collected and how you treat your list over time.

In this test here were the actual open rates:

Control email: Clicks / Total emails sent = 5%
Test email:  Clicks / Total emails sent = 4%

Given the size of the test set, a difference of 1% was not statistically significant.

A future case study will look at how a Kadlec Consulting client had these rates over 20%!

Tweet This Post