Email marketing is considered by many online marketing gurus as the most effective form of monetisation of a blog or business services sales via any website.

For the average person it seems on the surface with so many spam emails being sent out each day, that very few meaningful targeted emails will ever get through.

On our own social media marketing sites in Thailand and our business directories, we have our contact details including emails on our home pages, as we are told to do to be trustworthy by the S.E.O. fraternity, yet expect a minimum of 200 spam emails each day if you do this, even with spam filters.

If you are in business or thinking of starting a business, you probably will be selling online, as soon as you start your research, email marketing will be suggested and you will need to do your research to see whether it will be cost effective for you.

As a business mentor, I always get my mentees to try to understand the time element of starting anything new, getting it right, and putting a cost on to that time. This is an area so many new start-ups are alien to, which is the fact in the beginning there will be few boots on the ground and your time value is absolutely essential, easy to look on paper and say yes that’s feasible, but so many good intentions fall by the wayside due to time constraints.

Email marketing statistics.

First of all you have to understand the laws governing email marketing. We all hate spam or unsolicited email, the type of irrelevant emails like; erectile problems sent to ardent teenage males, and my personal favourite: Polar clothing when I live in Bangkok.

So the law is; the people that receive your emails should be a double opted in subscribers, as in; they fill in the form on a website asking for your emails, and then they must click the confirmation link your system sends to their email address, to be a bone fide subscriber.

Many people especially in the United States take spam emails very seriously indeed, and you can end up in a lot of hot water if you are caught spamming people.

According to statistics I gathered from the top sites; Awebber, Get Response and Mailchimp, and the internet this was my conclusion:

Average 20% open rate

in other words; for every 100 opted in subscribers; the industry average is; around 20 people will actual click and open the email you send to them. This is very dependent on your industry and whether you have some experience is the science of the types of headlines that make people click on an email.

Average 3% Click rate

If your email is well presented with good clear images, and has many useful links that your subscriber will get much benefit from, then you can expect around 3% of the 20% open rate to click on hyperlinks in the email to open blogs that have a call to action or to great offers on your products.

You must take the time to learn and evaluate the consistency, success and failures of each headline, image and link in each mailshot you send,

Using an email marketing service

Some start-ups, Gawd Bless em, will try the old Yahoo and Google mail marketing for free, so they start to send an email through their domestic email systems at around 200 emails an hour. Yes I tried it when I started I am ashamed to say!

This is a complete waste of time, yes you may get lucky and get a one in a million deal by sending 2,000 emails over 10 hours, but your email is most likely to be closed down as they know you are spamming, and think about it; do you like to deal with a business who cannot afford the $10 it costs to buy a domain and get the associated business-like email free with it?

Most of the bigger online email marketing companies mentioned above have user friendly systems for non techies who want to run official email marketing with templates, guides, blogs and user reports for your opens and click rates, everything you need to learn to make email marketing work for you.

Most of them come with features where you can download your existing database, but most will be very fussy about you downloading large files, and almost all the companies will bounce back; info@ contact@ and other service type emails, they are more likely to accept named email john@ Marie@ type emails as they are considered to be more personal and will effect less of a bounce rate (emails that are not opened).

Yes, they get in trouble for sending spam, not you, so you can understand their concern!

Pricing is based around the amount of subscribers you have, typically they start at $15 for 1,000 subscribers up to around $500 a month for 100,000 emails, which is a good system, you pay more as you get more subscribers.

You can send as many emails as you like, as often as you like, as your fee is for their servers, yet experience tells me most businesses have found once a week works best.

Building a list

This is the hardest part of all, if you have a website with 10,000 unique visitors each month and you are a very niche subject; you could; by adding a subscriber opt in form on your site at the bottom of your blogs, and on your home page clearly visible above the fold, and with a compelling headline and offer, like an e-book or free product sample etc, grow your email list by 50-100 subscribers each month. I did say you need time to study all this didn’t I?

If your website is very general information then you will need to break it down to niche subjects and have a separate list for each niche. Yeah,.. We are talking more staff now!

Then you could receive around 50 subscribers each month. You can get a lot more, more quickly, if you learn the basics of social media and how to get more subscribers by sharing your blogs through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and paying through Pay Per Click and Social media websites paid marketing etc.

For our example; let’s say you get your 50 subscribers a month then 20 months down the line you have 1000 double opted in subscribers, who are targeted real people.

The Maths

So what does this mean for numbers? Well let’s say your product or service average order value is $100.

You have say 1,000 double opt in subscribers (Twenty months in!)

You send out a well-designed, compelling, useful email, with links to great offers and information once a week with most importantly of all; a headline that is so impulsive that people will see it amongst all the spam and be compelled to open it!

Then you should expect 1000 x 20% = 200 opens, which even on it’s own is good branding of your business name.

Then; of those 200 opens 3%  clicking links = 6 interested people

Then if you say 1/3 of those 6 people purchase, then you have one 2 sales from that one email.

If you increase your sales from this last step  the proportionate profit gets very exciting!

Therefore: 2 x $100 = $200 Return on Investment, Versus the average cost of your email marketing system around $15 per/month (for 1,000 subscribers)

You can multiply this by 4 again, when you run an email every week per/month, but I hear you sighing about the time and effort that will take, hey ‘easy’ is never a word associated with success!

OK it’s profitable on paper, but you have to factor the 1-2 years’ work you need to get to this point, the investment in yourself to learn the basics of what people click, and the science of content marketing, branding and social media marketing.

It’s important to note; that on average your subscriber needs to see around 10 emails before they purchase.

The chief take-away for me is that; on average, if you have learned a lot and are quite professional at email marketing; for every 1000 subscribers you should make 2 sales, or 1 in 500 of whatever you sell or promote.

If you sell $500k houses then email marketing is a no-brainer, but if you sell single $0,20c elastic bands, you’d be better of renting a table at your local flea market.

Like anything in life and the undeniable physics of nature, is that what you put in you will get out, and consistency is the key. Don’t do what the ‘majority’ do; which is to give it 3-6 months then give up, make sure you will give it your full attention for at least one year, and you will start to earn good money from it.

Netmedia Thailand have been online marketing trainers and UK Government recognised small business mentors since 2009. Contact Netmedia for a chat about how to improve your website sales.