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 Hi Everyone, Please take it easy on a newbie who is curious and wants to learn from everyone... I'm starting an online retailer focused on sporting goods (apparel, equipment, etc.). I've been testing some numbers based on best practices research, and now I want to start rolling this out to a bigger sample. However, I have a question about how the numbers roll up. If I were to do the following: Affiliate: 10% of sales CSE: 20% of sales Email Marketing: 5% of sales SEM: 10% of sales That adds to 45% of sales spent on marketing. Does that sound right? Too high? Too low? Again, I'm not looking for anyone to "do my work for me", I'm just using you experts as a sounding board. Thanks in advance for the help - much appreciated. | ||
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November 2008 interesting question - i am not sure how to answer it, but am interested in hearing other people's answer. also - are you asking... should I re-invest 10% of my sales into Affiliate marketing? etc...?  Reply
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November 2008 Ask yourself this: If you can deliver all the sales you require through affiliate marketing on an acceptable CPA then why take on risk and pay CPM or CPC for SEM? I would go hard with an agressive affililate programme first (make sure you review what the competitors are offering first and be compeitive on commission). Many of the affiliates will run SEM, E-mail and Display and on your behalf and are often better at it than you can every be. Reply
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November 2008 Hi Everyone, Ok, I'll try to reply to each post... I agree with the hesitancy around SEM. We're doing some very limited SEM work - very long-tail focused. We're planning on spending much more on CSE, Affiliate and Email. I agree with your points about the competitors. And our own experience with SEM hasn't been that great. And regarding the first response, asking if my question was whether I should re-invest 10% (choosing an arbitrary number) in affiliate marketing, CSE, email, etc...yes, that's exactly what I'm asking. I think that relationship between sales and a marketing spend should be one easily measured and managed.
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November 2008 the question is a little back to front for me... i think you should look at what your ROI is for each of the activities and pump more into the ones with a positive ROI, and drop the unprofitable ones... Reply
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November 2008 I completely agree with where you're coming from....but the reason I needed some ballpark figures was to somehow get my arms around the starting point when beginning from scratch. I've now built some pretty comprehensive spreadsheets and have begun tweaking our metrics, based on that ROI. But when building that budget from scratch, I had a pretty good idea of what our revenue would be at first, so I wanted to back into the marketing costs, for initial budgeting purposes. A little backwards, but not when you think about defining a starting point... Reply
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