Email chickens and eggs

By Mark Brownlow

Obviously I'm convinced about email's marketing value. But just a quick warning about calculations that might see the value of email overestimated.

It's not uncommon to find statements like this:

"We looked at our customers and compared those who get our emails with those who never signed up. The former group had an average order size that was X% higher and their total orders per month were Y% higher, meaning they spent $Z per month more with us than the non-subscribers."

But is all that increase attributable to the emails? Wouldn't your better customers be more likely to sign up for emails in the first place? So did the emails drive purchase interest or did the purchase interest drive the email sign-up?

If those "subscribers" had never seen those emails, might they still have bought more than non-subscribers, simply because they're more engaged with your business anyway?

Nobody will thank me for pointing that out.

No, I'm not saying the emails are a waste of time (see my opening statement). Just that the common "subscriber / not a subscriber" comparison isn't entirely fair and potentially overestimates the positive impact.

A better comparison is to look at the "before subscribing" and "after subscribing" purchase behavior of subscribers. I have some more thoughts on this in a report excerpt on calculating ROI for newsletters.

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