Hi
I'm trying to put a business plan together and would like to know what number of sales I am likely to achieve from my mai8ling list. Has any one got any statistics as to how sucessful thier marketing campaign has been? e.g. how many people take up your offer of free stuff and how many of those go on to buy product? I'm not looking for exact figures, just ballpark percentages.
TIA
Alan
Hi Alan,
Your statistics are going to come down to how compelling your offer is.
For your free track offer, you should expect to see a relatively good conversion rate. Somewhere above 10%. I have had a free offer convert at 37%. Some people do better than that. It depends on how well you target your visitors.
From that subscriber base, you should conservatively shoot for 1% subscribers to buyers. Anything above that is considered doing pretty good.
So just to give you some nice round numbers... If your free offers converts at 10% and your sale offer converts at 1%, then you would need to drive 1000 visitors to get one sale. That's being conservative.
If your free track converts at 30% then you should see 3 sales from the same 1000 visitors at a 1% sales rate.
Coincidentally, watching these conversion rates will let you know exactly where there is a breakdown in your funnel. If your free offer converts well, but you are not seeing sales, then there is either a problem with your sales offer or there may be a problem with people opening your follow-up email. Check your autoresponder stats to sort it out.
All of this can be split tested to try to improve your conversion rates.
I just found my open rates for my follow up sequence. What are considered "good"
open rates? Mine gradually tapers off.
For AWeber users click on the "Reports" tab in the upper right corner and select "Reports",
then look down the list under "List Reports" on the left-hand side, click on "Followup Percentages."
1. Welcome message has 100% open rate (expected because here is where the DL is)
2. Short "about me" with link to interesting video: 46% open rate
3. Short message saying that since they are a subscriber that I will give them a
substantial discount on just the CD, %33 off with a link that goes to a 3-day
LTO to buy the CD at this price. This last one has a 28% open rate.
I plan to put more messages in between 2 and 3 to build more rapport, but this is all
I have built so far.
Yeah…
My average signup over the last 10 months has been 27%. I have some traffic sources that produce signups at better than 30% and some that produce less. Part of the reason I am getting lower signups overall is because I have started investing more in pay per click, and that tends to convert less. However, I'm doing much better than 1% in sales conversions — I'm finding that approximately 5% buy. That 5% is an estimate because what I actually track is subscriber value to make sure I'm not losing money in PPC ads, and my subscriber value has been approximately $0.63/subscriber.
To make a long story short, I pay a little less than 0.10/click for PPC ads. If one in four sign up (and that's about what I count on), then I pay 0.40 for a subscriber. So…I clear better than 0.20 for each PPC subscriber. It's a nice little money making machine. 🙂
Your results may vary. As John says, you can lose money when you pay for advertising. If you don't have money to lose, then be careful when you consider paid traffic sources.
Keeping in mind that results may vary and when you spend money on advertising you are taking a risk (that's my big fat disclaimer)...
1. For conversion rates on a squeeze page (subscribers), anything above 25% is pretty good. Below 20% you might want to keep tinkering. But it does depend on the traffic source. I've had JV traffic convert at 90%, while PPC traffic converted for me around 20% for the same offer. SEO traffic can can a lot as well depending on the keywords.
2. As far as sales conversion rates go, the industry standard that most marketers work around is 1%. HOWEVER, almost everyone of the MMM members I have spoken to is seeing a much better conversion rate. I am hearing everything from about 3% - as high as 10%. 10% is the highest I've ever had for music. 14% is the highest I've ever had on anything.
It also depends how you are doing the math. Many marketers just do the math based on how many unique visitors click on the sales page. I do it on my list as a whole.
If you have a good relationship with your list I don't think 4 or 5% is unrealistic.
It does really depend on the promotion as well. A release is usually going to convert much better than a simple promotion.
3. As far as email open rates go, it all depends on how old and big your list is. For an old list that is of decent size, I think anything above 20% is not bad. 40% and above is great. A new list will get open rates above 80%, sometimes over 100% (because of double clicks).
To give you an example, the MMM list is over 9000 subs and it gets anywhere from 30 - 50% open rate. It totally depends on the subject line.
TIP: You can always squeeze another good chunk of opens from your list if you create a segment of all the people who didn't open an email and resend with a new headline just to those people. I usually see another 10 or 15% as a result of doing that.
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