For Interactive Marketing Professionals (Length: 4 pages)

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Few marketers calculate the value of their email subscribers because they think it's too difficult. But understanding the value that email subscribers bring can help justify acquisition costs and build stronger customer relationships. Forrester's three-step formula — based on the costs to acquire and retain a subscriber, the email life span of that subscriber, and the potential revenue the subscriber will generate — provides marketers with a method to determine how much the customers on their lists are worth. To complete the calculation, marketers may need to add new fields to their email databases. But this can happen gradually, focusing on a few subscriber groups at a time. Then marketers should share the results across their organizations.