Calculate the value of an email

Mimi Plato 2

Does anyone know the best formula to calculate the value of an email? I've seen various formulas online, but not sure which would be correct. For example:

• Revenue generated by campaign / # of contacts in campaign = Revenue per email lead
• (Monthly revenue from email list – overhead costs)  / how many subscribers you had that month = revenue per subscriber
• Click Through Rate * Conversion Rate * Average Gift Amount - Email Value

I would assume we'd want to look at only revenue generating campaigns and look at each campaign individually. I welcome everyone's thoughts on this.


Thanks, Mimi

Brian Mucha

I don't have a clear answer, I suspect there isn't a single correct answer. Chimed in to mention Attribution Modeling, which can be pretty sophisticated.


What is the value of an email that is opened, but doesn't directly result in a conversion - when the recipient donates on their own later that week? Is an email that directly converted worth 100% of the donation if the recipient also heard a radio spot and saw a bus ad that month? There apparently are standard ways of dealing with all of that. 


We're not there either, but I heard a guy from Children's National describe their program, and it was pretty amazing.


B

Kathryn Hall

For the Luminate Benchmark Report we take an annual look at it... We track the value of usable email addresses over the course of a year. So the stat is "Transaction Total Revenue Per Usable Email (Total Online Transaction Amount / Constituents with Usable Email)"

Mimi Plato 2

Thanks Kathryn!


I agree with Brian there doesn't seem to be one way to calculate this. Knowing how Blackbaud calculates this is reassuring that I'm using a valid formula.