from the podcast with Jeanne Jennings, General Manager, Only Influencers:

RPE, revenue per email, is my very favorite metric of all time. Hands down, no question. It’s easy to calculate. You take the revenue that that campaign generated and you divide it by the number of emails that you sent. So it’s very easy to calculate. It’s much easier to calculate then return on investment ROI or even return on ad spend ROAS and and it’s a great if you do an A/B split test and you use your revenue per email as your KPI.

You’re very clearly going to see which email drove more revenue for every email that you sent. And that’s why it’s my very favorite metric. It’s a much better KPI than an open rate or a click through rate or anything like that. Revenue for email is a business metric. It goes directly to your bottom line. Revenue for most companies is what keep the lights, keeps on lights on in their business. If you are looking for legion from your email, if you need a sales rep to become involved before a sales done, then you want to take a look at leads generated, but open and click through rates are great diagnostic metrics, which means if you are looking to improve your revenue per email, you can look at your open and click through rates and you can kind of figure out which levers you need to shift to make that happen. 

So for instance, if you look at your open and click through rates and you have a really good open rate and you have a poor click through rate, then it’s very clear you need to work on the body of your email, get that click through, rate up. A lot of people are using an open rate or a click through rate is a KPI, which is a really bad idea. And we actually found when I looked back at a series of testing I had done for a client in late 2020, I looked at all of the tests. I looked at the winners based on based on revenue per email. Yeah. And then I looked at the click through rates for those. And what I found was only in 7% of the cases did, did a higher click through rate indicate a higher revenue per email.

77% of the cases. So if you’ve got a program right now and you’re relying on click through rate is your KPI, you could be getting it wrong 93% of the time and that’s pretty scary and open rates to especially now with MPP. I mean, open rates were never an absolute measure. There was always a margin of error. Now there’s an even higher one. If you’re testing subject lines, you do not want to be using open rate as your KPI because it’s not about getting them to open the email, it’s about getting them to convert or turn into a lead or whatever you need, pass the email. And so even if you’re testing subject lines, you want to use a business metric, not a diagnostic metric like open rate to be your KPI.

It’s also a great way to convince management of things, because if you can say this email that we send and this is an actual I had a client that we were doing cart abandonment emails, every card amendment email we sent generated $16. Well, how would you like it if every email you sent generated $16? I mean, we’d all be very wealthy. 

There were other emails that generated 0.016. And so when you talk to management about what we need to be doing, stuff like that makes it really clear and it’s hard for them to argue with those numbers. Like I said, unless it’s like, Oh, well, that was the message from the president. We need to keep doing it, but it’s hard to argue with this is a limited resource. If we over mail our list, they’re going to stop opening and responding. There’s erosion that happens. 

And so you need to make sure you’re not over mailing. You could be under mailing that happens. But in general, if you’re over mailing, you want to you want to get rid of those things that aren’t generating enough revenue for every hit. I also have had clients where this is this is the best where you’re sending an email and the number of unsubscribed is greater than the number of clicks. So you’re sending this email and more people are raising their hand and saying, Take me off your list. Don’t ever email me again than are saying, Oh, yeah, this is interesting. Let me learn more. So that’s another thing you can take a look at and you need to decide. And that’s typically if it’s an email like that, it’s going to have a very low revenue per email. But if it’s got a little revenue per email and your unsubscribed rate is higher than your click through rate, because unsubscribe you’re not included in click through rate, then that’s definitely an email that needs to either be dramatically changed or just go away because that’s doing more harm than good.