Is your email list worth $50 per subscriber?
The DailyCandy email list is: Comcast Sets Deal to Buy Daily Candy
Comcast Corp. has struck a deal to acquire Daily Candy, an email fashion and culture newsletter aimed at women. Comcast is paying $125 million for the property, according to people familiar with the matter. With 2.5 million readers, the email newsletter is of growing interest to advertisers who are migrating to new, Internet-based ways of reaching targeted demographics.
If you don’t have an email list of your own, perhaps it is time to start one.
One of our clients is Auspen - they make refillable whiteboard markers.
Auspen is a pretty simple website - there is information about their marker pens, and a PayPal based shopping cart to take orders online. They have a blog that talks about environmentally friendly products (and Julia has recently started writing some material for their blog).
The brief we had when we helped Auspen update from their old site was to get the site to convert (their old site hadn’t been driving any orders). The new site does that, from organic search traffic as well as paid search traffic.
But there was a secondary result that is really worth highlighting. Auspen get enquiries not just from prospective buyers, but also from prospective distributors. One of these enquiries turned into a real distributor relationship, which is in place now for the USA.
So when considering the benefits of getting a better online presence, it helps to think beyond just finding new leads and customers. A strong online presence contributes to the strength of your brand and can lead to bigger and better outcomes than just getting new customers.
Tim from Great Ocean Road Torquay sent me a summary today of his online conversion rate.
It may sound obvious, but being able to measure your conversion rate is a critical first step to improving it. So many businesses online don’t know what their conversion rate is yet.
In our discussion, I pointed Tim to this article from eMarketer: Few Convert at Retail E-Commerce Sites
This text that goes with the chart is brief and to the point:
Many shop. Few buy. Online merchants convert an average of 2%-3% of their site visitors into buyers, according to the e-tailing group’s “Sixth Annual Merchant Survey.”
Do you know your conversion rate? Is it better than the average for eCommerce sites?
Overall, I think beating the average is tough.
Tim and I discussed the relative merits of focussing on conversion. I think conversion is very important, but its not the only factor.
Profit. How much profit do you make from each conversion? Time spent increasing the profit from each conversion could benefit you more than increasing the conversion rate.
Product Diversity. If you already have a customer base, can you create additional streams of income? Adding a new income stream may be more effective than increasing the size of an existing one.
Geographic Diversity. Similar to product diversity, can you create a new stream of income by increasing your focus on a particular geography? I can’t fully explain why, but every time we create a more specific country based campaign in Google AdWords, more click throughs appear. So can you create a new income stream from a new country (if your product or service suits that model), or increase it from a small stream to a larger one?
Conversion is important, but it is only a contributor to overall profit.
