Our open rates were north of 35%. Our click-through rates were above 2.5% and our purchase rates were solid. We were still really small, but we had a good set of engaged email subscribers.
We focused on personalized email campaigns based on what we knew about our customers' tastes. We sent birthday emails because we had to get birthdays when people ordered alcohol.
We believed that if we could figure out what an email subscriber cost us, we could afford to acquire more email subscribers. If we could do that, our business would then be predictable. And the enemy of growth and success in a startup is unpredictability.
Over the next few weeks, we found that our average email subscriber was worth just under $2.00 in net revenue to us per month. Again, we were SMALL, so we didn’t have a lot of sales per month, but now we had the knowledge. And now we had the potential to grow our business in a predictable way. And now we knew that our best chance at scaling was to use email marketing ecommerce tricks and best practices to scale.
Armed with what each subscriber was worth to us, our efforts now had to focus on whether we could acquire subscribers for less than what that subscriber was worth to us. So at that point, it was just a matter of testing different channels to acquire new subscribers for our emails.
We tested affiliate channels. We partnered with wine and food blogs and exchanged referral emails. We tested overseas chinese in usa data coupons that our customers and website visitors could share with friends. And we started investing small amounts of money in paid acquisitions to gain customers, leads, and email add-ons.
Most of these tests didn't work. Some brought in almost zero email subscribers. Some brought in email subscribers, but drove them away with such a high price that we knew we couldn't optimize that price to a level that would be profitable.
But we were still hopeful and we found glimmers of positive signs. Some channels were either nearing our breakeven point, so we thought we could optimize those efforts to be profitable – or – be profitable immediately.
This gave us not only our North Star metric for our e-commerce email efforts, but also our North Star metric for our business as a whole. We became obsessed with this metric, found channels that worked, and began to rapidly grow our email list.
Definition of North Star Metric by airfocus
Over time, the company began to grow and become profitable. Eventually, it was acquired by a competitor, which led to consolidation, and we are working on a number of other businesses. But lessons have been learned.