When running an email campaign, getting people to open your email is the first step that will lead them to a purchase. According to eROI, free shipping is a promotion that will most likely increase your open rate. If you can increase the open rate or the flow anywhere along the path to purchase (open, click-through, add to cart, checkout, confirmation, purchase) then you will have a much more profitable campaign.

I recently ran a pre-Christmas promotion and we had a 3.76% click-through rate and then about a 5% conversion of those that made it to the site. The numbers look small, but the campaign gave us about a 1500% ROI (mostly due to cart size.) I think that we will also do a post-Christmas sale, but this time we will use free shipping in the subject line. If this does have a significant effect on the open rate and the click-through rate (let’s assume an additional 1% click through to the site) then our ROI would increase to 2000%.

It’s amazing what a small change on the front end (1%) can do on the back end (increase ROI from 1500% to 2000%.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 and is filed under Whatever, Business, Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.