Normally email and profit don’t go in the same sentence at least in the minds of most B2B marketers – but actually they should.

Everything has a cost associated with it and email is no exception – so this podcast focuses on how much lift in revenues and profits you can get out of your email program if you are in B2C or B2B marketing.

To accomplish this I decided to speak to Steve Webster, Chief Strategy Officer from iPost who has published several case studies on the topic of improving profits via email. Don’t miss he views on this topic.

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About Steve

Stephen Webster leads iPost’s Sales team and co-founded iPost in 1996 to address the need for well-designed, professional email services and software. Prior to founding iPost, he worked on email systems for an IBM-funded consortium called ITC, and served as engineering director for the award-winning Z-Code, co-founded by iPost’s CTO, Bart Schaefer, PhD. Webster is a frequent keynote speaker on behavioral targeting, profitable and effective email marketing, and cross-channel marketing programs. He holds a BSEE from Carnegie Mellon University.

 

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It always seems that marketing metrics is a fertile topic to discuss and write about but after reading a few recent Forrester research reports I think they really helped me to crystallize how I am going to be tracking metrics going forward but they also gave me a sense of what importance I should give to each of them.

While not plagiarizing them outright – I think I have adapted them to things I have blogged about before. I still feel there is only one metric that counts – SALES. Ringing the cash register is the best if not the only way to prove marketing value (as I have told you in the past). And our lead nurturing platform has been immensely helpful in giving transparency into that process and showing that value.

But many of you have questioned my outright simplicity of just using one metric by saying to me – don’t you measure Impressions? or don’t you measure Cost per Click?

Well of course I do but do I then email those stats to the CEO? No. But I do feel they have a place in your metrics so let me give you my 3 tiers of marketing metrics:

1) Reach metrics – Web site impressions, page views, radio impressions etc…
2) Efficiency metrics – Cost per click, time spent on the website, downloads of a paper or podcast etc.
3) Value – Contribution to Pipeline, contribution to Bookings, ROI on overall bookings.

So there you have it and these tiers infer some priority to them – reach being the least and value being the most.

I am also going to begin to look at reach metrics PAIRED with value metrics – ex – graph my weekly lead flow against my media budget looking for spikes or relative lift. This could be a good way to prove lift on a media budget for those budget discussions we all have.