we could just figure out how much an email subscriber was worth to us, we could afford to go out and acquire more email subscribers. If we could do that, our business would be predictable. And the enemy of growth and success in a startup is unpredictability.
Over the next few weeks, we discovered that our average mobile database email subscriber was worth just under $2.00 in net revenue per month to us. Again, we were SMALL, so we didn’t have much revenue per month, but now we had knowledge. And now we had the potential to scale our business predictably. And now we knew that our best chance to scale was to use ecommerce email marketing tricks and best practices to scale.
Armed with what each
subscriber was worth to us, our efforts now needed tochoose a tone and content appropriate for your focus on whether we could earn a subscriber for less than that subscriber was worth to us. So, at that point, it was simply a matter of testing different channels to acquire new subscribers for our emails.
We tested affiliate channels.
And we started investing small amounts of money in paid acquisition to drive customers, prospects, and email ads.
Most of these tests didn’t work. Some drove almost zero email subscribers. Others drove email subscribers but at such a high price that we knew we couldn’t optimize that price to a level that would be profitable.
But we held out hope and found glimmers of positive fresh list signs. Some channels were close to our break-even point, so we thought we could optimize those efforts to help us be profitable, or they were profitable immediately.
