Analyzing Marketing Channels

CFP Land is my free email newsletter for conference speakers. I'm also developing a Pro tool, and sell occasional sponsorships.

I have been marketing it pretty aggressively this summer, so I wanted to take a look at each channel, and see what's working and what isn't. Maybe you can learn something from this analysis, or give me some feedback on how I can improve my little business.

CFP Land marketing overview

• Visitors - Unique visitors who come in via the channel.
• Signups - Email newsletter signups from the channel.
• Services - The amount I'm paying in services that automate this channel.
• Hours - The number of hours I'm spending maintaining this channel.
• Rate - My "hourly rate", which is artificially low, but meant to be a placeholder as I'd like to hire someone at roughly this rate once I figure out what works and what doesn't.
• Total Spend - Combines the hours worked and services paid for on each channel.
• CPV - Cost Per Visitor
• CPA - Cost per Acquisition. Ultimately, this is what I'm optimizing for.

Channels

Cold Emails

By scraping emails using Hunter and Phantom Buster on Linkedin, I can get about 1000 email addresses per month. Then I send some cold outreach with GMass. So far, this has not performed as well as I hoped. Early on I did this with emails from Github and it was much more successful, so I may have to abandon this if it doesn't pick up.

Twitter

I do targeted following and auto-dming on Twitter. This has been one of the most successful (and consistently used) channels to date.

Organic SEO

I don't spend any money on SEO, but some of my dev work contributes to it. Mostly just optimizing tags and adding new archive pages to improve page count.

Blog content

While blog content contributes to SEO (so it's hard to separate these two channels), I count new visitors who come into blog posts as a separate channel. I like publishing regular content, but the time it takes makes it really hard to justify, especially when I look at it compared with other channels here.

Referrals

Excluding Twitter, most other inbound links I get are organic. I have reached out to a few websites to trade links, so that accounts for the 1 hour of time I've spent, but this has obviously been a really successful channel.

Analysis

At this point, my paid product is immature and sponsorship dollars are pretty inconsistent, so I don't have a great LTV (Lifetime Value) for each email subscriber, but I am hoping I can get it up to around $5.

With that in mind, it's pretty clear that many of these channels aren't going to work. Cold email seems to be a bust, and while blog content does contribute to SEO, I could publish fewer, more focused posts and probably still get the same lift.

I also want to explore link-building more. Referrals from other blogs, social media platforms, Quora, etc. seem to be paying off, and I've spent very little time on them thus far.

Hope that was interesting, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts/critiques!