Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData

Email Subscribers: Clicks per Year

How many times per year should an email subscriber click through a campaign and interact with your merchandise?

Ideally, it's a big number. Intuitively, it's a big number.

In reality ... it's two (2). Two times per year.

That's in-part a function of how tepid and feckless most email marketing programs are. I don't need to know for the 20th time this month that you are at 50% off plus free shipping, with no product ever featured above-the-fold. You are not even trying. No wonder nobody clicks through your campaigns.

If you do an average job ... just an average job ... some of your email list will click-through at least two campaigns per year.

Go run the query right now ... find out what percentage of twelve-month buyers with a valid email address clicked through at least two times in the past year? Get ready to be disappointed with what you learn.

Are Search Customers New Customers?

Ha!

There's folks out there who tell you that, when evaluating channels like Search or Social, you are evaluating revenue from new customers divided by total ad cost in those channels ... you're assuming that those channels deliver new customers.

And yes, they deliver new customers.

But your existing customers also respond to those channels.

Here's what the data looked like for one brand - percentage of search orders by customer life stage.

20% = First Order.
10% = Second Order.
20% = 3rd - 5th Order.
18% = 6th - 10th Order.
32% = 11th+ Order.

Yeah, that's actual data.

Oh oh.

This, of course, renders many of the canned aMER calculations useless.

More important, what does it mean if 32% of search orders come from customers ordering for at least the eleventh time with your brand? I mean, they're loyal to your brand or they wouldn't have purchased ten or more times ... and still, they're out there searching, looking for a different dating partner.

Your answer to that question tells you a lot about the value proposition of your brand.

P.S.: The higher your annual rebuy rate, the higher the fraction of search customers who are well-along the customer life cycle. The lower your annual rebuy rate, the more the skew of search customers to new customers.

Feedback

Another birthday ... the years are adding up, folks. I won't be doing this work forever!

Sometimes I look ahead ten or fifteen years. A world where I'm playing pickleball even more often. Would anything that has been shared over the past two decades still be used? Remembered? Or will it just be you and your AI companion employing best practices?

Do me a favor. Send me an email (kevinh@minethatdata.com) and share some feedback.

Your favorite post(s) from the past two decades.
How you are using this content in your job - have you employed any tactics that benefitted your brand?
What would you like to see me write more about in the future?
Who do you hire that competes with me, and why do you make that choice?

No replies are bad replies ... let me know your thoughts.

Scrubbing The Humanity Out Of Things

This came across Bluesky on Monday. This was a gif ... the photos represent the start of it and the end of it.

Now I'm not a fan of driving any brand off of any website, that's insane.

But the AI-based sentiment is reasonable. I mean, look at how sterile the second image is.

I get a lot of emails ... some of them are those ridiculous "pitches" from vendors ... they're using AI to "speak" to me. They are also scrubbing the humanity out of the processes they're recommending AI for.

There is a future date where AI data centers consume all of the electricity and water that we deserve. Between now and then, be sure to balance your ability to do more things without scrubbing all of the humanity out of what your brand does.

An Exception to Sloppiness

I had a client with an approximate $60 AOV. That client couldn't get away with anything. Absolutely anything. Any level of sloppiness was met with p&l challenges. When you have a low AOV, you have to have a high attention to detail to make the business work.

In B2B, you might have a high AOV ... it's common to see $2,000 orders or $4,000 orders. Do you know what happens when you have a $3,000 AOV? Sloppiness. You can get away with any level of marketing expense mismanagement, because you are generating $1,800 of gross margin per order. Make a ton of mistakes? $1,800 of gross margin per order might go down to $1,750.

Meanwhile, the same $50 level of sloppiness puts the $60 AOV brand out of business.

If you are a marketer, you might be amazed at the level of discipline (or lack of it) that the B2B marketer with a $3,000 AOV possesses when you switch jobs from a low AOV brand to a high AOV brand.

If you work for an agency or are a consultant, you intuitively know this fact. Your job is much harder convincing the $3,000 AOV B2B brand to do anything that improves the p&l. The agency pro needs to know the audience the B2B brand speaks to before determining whether a B2B brand is smart or not.