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Master Your Metrics - Unleashing The Power Of Email Marketing Analytics
Episode 22010th January 2024 • The Email Marketing Show • Email Marketing Heroes
00:00:00 00:37:32

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Do you track any email marketing metrics? How can you use your email marketing analytics to improve your email marketing?

If this is a topic you've been avoiding, the great news is that looking at metrics, understanding them, and using them to your advantage isn't as hard as it might sound. Just collect the right data, and you'll be able to spot opportunities for improvement and growth. And yes, that means more money!

So let's get into it. 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:19) Join our FREE Facebook group.

(2:59) Why do email marketing analytics matter?

(4:18) What email marketing metrics should you look at?

(7:59) What can you do if your open rates are low?

(11:55) The truth about your click-through rates.

(13:25) How to increase your click-through rates?

(20:51) What can you do when your conversion rate is low?

(25:12) What can you do when your unsubscribe rate is high?

(30:15) How can you use your email marketing analytics data?

(32:44) Why you should always calculate your EPSPM.

(35:46) Subject lines of the week.

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Why do email marketing analytics matter? 

Email analytics help you figure out where the biggest levers and opportunities for your email marketing are. When you look at the right metrics, you can get more from your emails. Plus, the analytics you need to track and understand aren’t that complicated and can (mostly) be found inside your email marketing platform.

You probably think that one of the biggest metrics we suggest you track is the growth of your email list. And while that’s something you should look at, other metrics will tell you whether you have a well-refined engine that’s working for you. By knowing which email campaigns are doing well, you'll find out where you have room for improvement.

What email marketing metrics should you look at?

Open rates

If you find that one specific email in one of your campaigns has a zero open rate, you’ll want to look at that. As we always say, open rates aren’t reliable, as such. But they’re still a good indicator in comparison to each other.

So if you see a surprisingly low open rate one day or on one specific email, you may want to investigate. Could it be the timing? Or the subject line? This matters because if no one opens an email, it means they haven’t seen the link to your offers. In other words, if no one opens your emails, you won't be able to influence your click-through rate. 

Click-through rate

Click-through rates are shown as the percentage of people who’ve clicked on your links based on how many people you sent the email to.

They used to be shown as a percentage of the people who opened the email, which isn't great and something systems have moved away from. This is because the way open rates are tracked is broken. So it’s best to look at the percentage of people who clicked on your links based on how many people you sent the emails to. Email platforms have switched to this method of tracking, so if you’ve recently seen your click-through rates drop through the floor, that’s probably why - the way they're being tracked has changed. But that's a good thing!

Conversion rate

Another metric you want to track is your conversion rate. How many people took action as a result of you sending an email? When we talk about 'taking action', that could mean buying your product but also registering for a webinar, for example. It's about whatever action you're asking your subscribers to take in that email.

Bounce rate and unsubscribe rate

You'll also want to track your bounce rate, which looks at how many email addresses weren't deliverable.

And finally, you want to track your unsubscribe rate. Every time you send an email, some people will unsubscribe - that's just a fact. That’s the cost of your email marketing but also the reason why there should always be some kind of offer in every email you send. 

Tracking your email marketing analytics

If you’re inside our membership The League, you’ll know we have a piece of training that takes you through how to track your email analytics in great detail. So once you set up any email campaign, you can take a look at the open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate of each campaign and, overall, at the bounce rate and unsubscribe rate of your email marketing.

This means you then have levers that you can start pulling on to improve your email marketing. So let's look at each metric in more detail.

What can you do if your open rates are low?

If you have a low open rate (10-30%) on one of the emails inside a campaign, it could be that the subject line needs tweaking. Otherwise, you should be looking at your engagement.

A lot of our clients, when they first come into our world, may have massive email lists, but they'll tell us they've never done any engagement management. Once someone subscribes to their list, unless they leave of their own accord, no action is being taken by the list owner to keep an eye on who’s opening the emails, who’s clicking on the links, or who’s doing anything.

Are you implementing good email list hygiene?

Ordinarily, what we see when people join our programme and start implementing our campaigns is that the frequency of their emails increases. And the first thing we advise our clients to look at is who is likely to open those emails.

If you have a list of 10,000 people and 1,000 of them open an email you send, you have a 10% open rate. But if only 5,000 of the people in your list are even using their email addresses (because all the others aren't valid anymore), you’re only really sending your emails to 5,000 people – not 10,000. The others are dead emails, spam traps, or people who no longer engage with you.

This is why it’s important to look at your business and let go of this vanity metric of how many subscribers you have on your list. It only matters if you take the time to regularly try and revive or re-engage the people who aren’t paying attention and then delete them if they don’t re-engage with you. Deleting people might sound painful, but it’s the best possible thing for the hygiene of your list. Once you start doing that, you’ll see your click-through rate go up, and you'll be able to get your list to a point where your subscribers are people who care.

The truth about your click-through rates

What happens if your open rates are good, but people aren’t clicking on the links to your offers? Typically, when you first present an offer, you’re going to see a higher click-through rate compared to the people who've gone through an entire email campaign that talks about your core offer. 

Over time, people will click on different versions of that offer, and the click-through rate will improve. Then in your day-to-day email marketing (i.e. the email you send live each day), you’re going to see a lower click-through rate when talking about that same offer.

That's because the whole point of the longer-term relationship-building you’re doing with your daily emails is about waiting for the right time for people to want to buy your product. If they had an urgent need for it, they would have bought it during the first 60 days of you emailing them through your campaigns. Because that’s what those campaigns are designed to do.

The reason why people haven’t bought from you yet is that it’s not yet the right time for them. So you can expect a lower click-through rate, which, of course, means a lower conversion rate too.

How do you increase your click-through rates?

If you want people to click on the links in your emails, make them really obvious that there's something to click on. Spell out “Click here to do X” – no matter what action you want your subscribers to take. Let people know they can click and make sure that your links look like links (i.e. blue and underlined).

To make them stand out even more, you can even put them on a separate line. If your click-through rate is super low, you could use the most obnoxious-looking link for a few weeks to make sure people see it. You could even temporarily add some chevron arrows in front of it and put it all in capital letters. Once you know people are seeing it and are clicking on it, you can then dial things down again and remove all the extra bits.

We’re literally obsessed with getting people to click on the links in our emails, which is why we put together a resource called Click Tricks, which you can get for FREE. It includes 12 creative ways of drawing attention to the links in your email so people don't scroll past them. We did some testing a couple of years ago, and we found situations where a lower open rate could still lead to a higher click-through rate because of what the links in your emails look like. So we know it works!

Why you want to increase your click-through rate and not your open rate

Think about sales calls. You're better off having fewer calls but with higher-qualified leads than lots of calls with people who aren't necessarily interested. You'll get more people buying that way. Having loads of sales calls with just anyone and everyone isn't as effective because it 'waters down' your sales process. The same thing applies to email marketing - you can get fewer but more qualified people opening your emails, and those will be the people who click on your emails.

The idea that if you have a bigger list you’ll get more opens and more clicks (and therefore more sales) isn’t necessarily true. What you’re looking for is the highest click-through rate, which might not come from having more subscribers or from having a high open rate.

There are lots of things you can do to increase your open rates (including using dodgy subject lines). But that doesn’t mean you’re going to get more sales. Instead, use subject lines that help you optimise the opening of the email and the clicking of the link so that, over time, you get the right pool of people. The more emails you send, the better you'll notice you become at this.  

The impact of subject lines on your click-through rate

Your subject lines can affect your open rate, and, in turn, that can influence your click-through rate. It's worth thinking about the level of intent of the people you’re sending emails to. Most campaigns are going to have subject lines that are suitable for people at the bottom of the funnel, which is the point where you’re telling them your programme is closing soon, for example.

These aren’t the emails where you use obscure subject lines where people need to open the email to find out your offer is closing. You'll want to tell them straight up in the subject line! We call these 'label on the box' subject lines - it tells you what's in it.

There will be times when a subject line needs to help you with an outcome. But then you’ll have other types of subject lines that are more ‘obscure’ – those that use compound curiosity, for example, and say exactly what's inside the email. That way, people need to open and read the email to find out. And those are the subject lines that help you increase the open rates of your emails.

What can you do when your conversion rate is low? 

If you’re doing a good job of optimising open rates and click-through rates, but your conversion isn’t great, it’s probably nothing to do with your emails. Often, this has more to do with your offer. Maybe you have the wrong people on your list. Or maybe your offer isn’t good or is poorly presented. Perhaps it’s not conveying the value and the transformation it can deliver.

If you’ve taken something super bland, put it on sale, and expect email marketing to work wonders for it, it won't happen. If you use your emails hoping to get massive click-through rates for something that’s ultimately rubbish, you won't convert. So you need to go back to the start. Have you got the right people on your list? Are they opening your emails? Are they clicking on your links?

If you do, and the page isn’t converting, you’re probably not sending enough people to it. We recently noticed one of our clients who was offering a $6,000 programme telling us they only had 60 people on their list. While we always say the size of your list doesn't really matter, when you do the maths, even if you had one person on a list of 60 people buying a high-ticket price product, you’d be doing better email marketing than most people! In reality, in that case, you need more people on your list.

You also need to look at your list hygiene. Are the email addresses on your list still active? Because you need a real human behind those email addresses who opens and engages with them. It's all about engagement monitoring and launching re-engagement campaigns when necessary. Don't forget that! If people aren’t engaging with your emails in a period of 60 days, put them through a revival sequence and give them one last chance to engage. If they don’t, unsubscribe them from your list.

What to do when your unsubscribe rate is high? 

Every time you send an email, you'll have some people unsubscribe from your list. That's just going to happen. In our welcome sequence (the Getting to Know You sequence) we tell people we’re going to email them every day with something that’s going to help them with their email marketing. But if that’s not for them, the door is always open, and they can leave (unsubscribe) at any time.

We see a lot of email marketers who are worried about sending emails because they don’t want their subscribers to leave. And massive amounts of unsubscribes all in one go aren’t good for anyone. It’s not good for you, and it’s not good for your email marketing platform. We know that. When people join our list, for example, we have the biggest spikes of unsubscribes in the first 5 days. Then the unsubscribe rate remains quite low over time, just to spike up again when we have a big influx of email marketing activity. But that's fine and to be expected. What matters is that the people who choose to say, do so for a long time. 

How are people joining your list?

If your unsubscribe rate is generally high, and a lot of people on your list tend to leave immediately or very quickly, it’s worth looking at where the people are coming from. What’s the intention with which people join your email list? Because we can’t rely on tricking people to join – we can’t promise them something, and then give them something else. We know that some activities for acquiring new people on your email list notoriously drive high unsubscribe rates.

For example, if different businesses get together and put their products into a bundle that’s advertised together, you’ll have people who opt in because they’re interested in one or more of the products. But because they don’t have a relationship with you directly, you might have a high unsubscribe rate when you start emailing them. And this might be okay for you if you know why it’s happening. You’ll expect a big exodus of people during the first few weeks after that event, but as long as you get good sales and a return on investments, you may be fine with that.

Not all methods of bringing people onto your list are created equal. If you’re running cold traffic via ads to your lead magnet and never mention that you’re going to continue emailing people, you’re going to have a high unsubscribe rate. On the other hand, if you do a guest training or run an event, and people join your list because they loved what you delivered and want more of it, you’re going to have a lower unsubscribe rate.

Your unsubscribe rate is going to change depending on the source where people came from. Just monitor the net outcome of each activity. You might be okay with a huge unsubscribe percentage from a certain lead source if you understand why that's happening.

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How can you use your email marketing analytics data? 

Whenever you build and run a new campaign to your email list for the first time, you may be tempted to check your sales. But you can (and should) look at your email marketing analytics too. What were the:

  • Open rate. 
  • Click-through rate.
  • Conversation rate
  • And the unsubscribe rate for that campaign?

When you then automate that campaign, you’ll have some initial data to look at. And we suggest you put a process in place to check the data every 90 days and compare it. Did you notice any changes? Is there anything you think you can improve or fix? Maybe you can tweak the hook of an email or the angle of an offer. Most of the time, you won’t have to change anything, but sometimes you'll spot things that no longer work.  

This is also super helpful if your business has changed. It’s always good to check your automated campaigns from time to time in case you’ve changed your offers or the products or services you sell. Your email marketing analytics and metrics help you make your future campaigns better. You’ll have the quantitative data that tells you what needs tweaking. Over time, you’ll also get better at this and will develop a natural hunch as to what’s going to work better.

Why you should always calculate your EPSPM

Finally, the North Star metric that we always use is the EPSPM, which is your Earnings per Subscriber per Month. It tells you how much you're earning from your list every single month. You calculate it by dividing the amount of money you’ve made in that month by the number of subscribers you have on your list in the same period.

Over time, tracking your EPSPM will show you a trend and tell you exactly how your email marketing is doing. When your EPSPM is increasing, it means you’re getting better at putting things in front of your email subscribers. It doesn’t matter how big your list gets because as long as you check this metric, you’re getting consistent data. And that helps you understand how your email marketing is doing. For us, this is the number that puts all the other email marketing metrics together.

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “My humiliating webcam mishap.” This is a subject line where people immediately paint a picture in their heads. It takes only seconds for the mind of a grown adult to guess what might have happened. Sure, everyone's version of it will be a little different, but they'll want to open the email to find out what happened. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Advanced Psychology: Using Compound Curiosity.

Transcripts

Unknown 0:00

Yeah

Unknown 0:19

Hey, it's Rob and Kennedy. Hello. Today

Unknown 0:21

on the Email Marketing Show we're talking about how to master your metrics, how to unleash the power of those email marketing analytics, the numbers and how it doesn't have to be as newsworthy as you

Unknown 0:32

mail Marketing Show community:

Unknown 1:02

He still remembers the first card trick he ever learned. It's comedy hypnotist, comfortable and he

Unknown 1:07

prefers to cook with only the hood light on it's like a logical mind reader Kennedy the Americans are gonna be like, Well, why is he putting my stuff

Unknown 1:21

outside the kitchen window lifted, talked about the The X Factor The moodiness of just maybe the over diversity in there. I just got over a month. If I give him some management stuff. It

Unknown 1:32

is hard to see where the character of your fingers begin on stuff.

Unknown 1:39

So this first show, was it. Oh, that's good. Yeah. And then wow. Wow. It's very good.

Unknown 1:45

Is that one you know, you've got the deck into four piles, and you have to do some jiggery pokery and then before you know it, there's four aces on the top of the four piles. Amazing. So remember that it's the one of the first tricks it only goes to our teachers, because that trick actually makes in the pool. That's the one because if asked if I could do that age four, they'll build to do that when they're hammered at the Dublin Paris.

Unknown 2:01

Hello every week on the show we show you how to make more sales and earn more money from your email subscribers. We're talking about email marketing strategies, psychology tactics, and share what's working right now to make more sales online making you the email marketing hero of your business with a brand new episode every Monday and Wednesday. Make sure you hit subscribe on your podcast player. So

Unknown 2:20

analytics. Fortunately none of that complicated shenanigans like Google Analytics and all those things. So it's tracking a website. And the good news is before we get into this email analytics are much easier than any of that complication that we don't. We don't like looking at. Yeah,

Unknown 2:33

and whenever we get the rest of it, but the good news is about these things is they really help you to figure out where the biggest lever where your biggest opportunity is. For making more from your emails, which mobile app he had talked about every single week, isn't it. And the other great thing is in general, or pretty much every single analytic you need is in your email platform. Pretty much every single one of them is as one which might not be but will but it's a really simple one to grab ahold of. Right. So

Unknown 2:56

one of the interesting things one of the interesting things I think a bit ahead of this is that we get asked a lot you know, people assume that one of the big metrics we're going to suggest you look at is the is the growth in email subscriber rate. And that is a metric you should look at. But that's way down the road from what we're going to really talk about, like first let's talk about just assume you've got as many subscribers as you got, and you've never gonna get any more right. Let's imagine that for a second. Lock that down. And then let's focus on the on the metrics around making that as good as it can be so that when you add more people later, you already know you've got a well refined engine that's that's working for you. And

Unknown 3:24

this is the kind of analytics you're gonna use to figure out which of the emails are doing well, which email sequences or campaigns are doing well, and where there's room for improvement. For example, I think it was the third email in our our first sales campaign and our score email engine. It's called an overture campaign. So those of you who are in our programmes are no wonder what your campaign is. And the third email we looked at, we went in and we looked at like the open rate was zero, it wasn't even like low it was zero, like what's going on there. Because even though open rates are you can't be trusted to say it says this individual human being opened it therefore they did open it because of the way that Apple and Android and stuff are misreporting that information and screwing that information. But in general, the percentage is a good indicator whether you're up or down based on you know, last week and last month and the last email and mechanism. So, but to say zero was kind of a bit of a thing. So we were like how do we fix that? And it was really interesting to see how we played around with that by by playing with the timing of the email that delay between the previous one this one and also through the subject line too, because the day someone's if no one's open an email, they can't even see the link to click because which means you can't get them to click increasing click through rate, which is the next analytic. So we're gonna be talking about open rates and we want you to look at your click through rates, how many we know what percentage of people are clicking that can be displayed in a couple different ways. By the way, most of them are moving away from the bad one, thankfully, because basically, it's either going to be shown as a number the percentage of people who've clicked based on how many people you sent the email to, or it could be shown as a percentage of the people who opened the email. Now the reason that the systems have moved away from it based on the percentage that we've opened, is because open rates is broken. So it's probably going to be click through rate as a percentage of people who you've sent it to, which means if your platform has shifted, you might think suddenly your click through rates dropped down through the floor, and it hasn't next one we're gonna look at we're gonna get into these in detail a bit is your conversion rate. So what percentage of conversion did did it make your you sent an email? How people actually bought from that or, or register for a call or when it's gonna be and your bounce rate. So when you send an email, how many people how many people's email addresses just were not deliverable and it bounced back and your unsubscribe rate? There's some good number. So again, every time you send an email, the cost of sending an email is that some people will always unsubscribe, every single time you send an email. That's the reason we always say there should always be some kind of offer in every email. Because even if you're not making an offer, some people are gonna leave and that's a cost to you.

Unknown 5:39

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I think let's take a look at what's the best way to do this. What let's take a look through them in order of doing them.

Unknown 5:48

What are we looking for members of our programmes you'll know that we have a training called The Tao of funnel optimization where we take you through these in great detail so it once you've set up any email campaign, what we want you to do is take a look at these numbers. What was the open rate of each email sequence? What was the click through rate? What was the conversion rate of that sequence? And then overall, for your, for your whole email marketing, what's your bounce rate of your email subscribers? And what's your unsubscribe rate? And that means you've got a bunch of levers that you can start start pulling on. So it Rob if someone's gonna low open rate for that emails, and by low we're talking about anything less than 10%. I would say this low is pretty low. I'm

Unknown 6:28

going to be meaner than that. I think. I mean, that's definitely low, but I think if it's less than 100 doesn't know if it's less than like 30%. I would really be looking at consistently I would really look at it and go in that feels very low. But yeah, 10% would be definitely low for sure. I think.

Unknown 6:41

So somebody says dude, I've just launched a paparazzi sale campaign from us on my open rate on the emails of that campaign averaged out at 5%. What's the best piece of advice that you would sort of go to straightaway?

Unknown 6:54

people, and:

Unknown 8:26

It's a game. It's not a sport. Wow,

Unknown 8:30

I bet the people you would say it's a sport. They're Olympians. Anyway, athletes. So that's the point right? So the first thing is to really look and sometimes you just have to take a long hard look at your your, your business and go, I'm gonna let go of this vanity metric that I talked about how many subscribers I've got, and instead, I'm going to delete a bunch of people who are not paying attention after trying to revive them. And so a lot of the time our advice is looking at your list, I think you need to run a big reengagement thing that's probably going to result in you deleting half of your email list and I know that sounds painful, but it's the best possible thing. Drop it off now. And then and then carry on and what happens immediately is a vanity thing it's not a vanity thing and reality thing you will wonder it's got your click through rates go up. That is a sign that you've that you've started to practice really good list hygiene that you're starting to bring your subscribers to a point where you've only got people who really care so again, usually if it's one or two emails have a particularly Dicky open rate, then it's probably just the fact that you need to tweak those subject lines. If it's every time I send an email the open rate is super low. That's probably indicative that your your engagement management is bad and you're emailing a bunch of people who don't really care anymore.

Unknown 9:28

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So let's now speak about the click through rate so if you notice you're getting the opens up pretty good, but just not many people are clicking on the link to your emails with links to your office. The first thing I want to say about this is when you first present an offer to somebody, you're gonna see higher click through rates than let's say somebody goes through an entire score, email engine, like a whole bunch of emails, talking about your main room. All roads lead to roll your main offer and you do that for like, say 60 days. Over that time, you're gonna see people clicking to different offer different versions of that offer. Then you're gonna see a pretty good click through rate on those. Then in your day to day email marketing your, you know, the emails that you send live each week, you're gonna see a lower click through rate when you're talking about that same offer, just because the whole point of that longer term relationship building you're doing with your newsletter is literally about waiting for the right time for people to want to buy that thing. If they had a really urgent need for it, they would have bought it already during that first 60 days during that for those first few weeks of your automations because that's what those automations are designed to do. Whereas if the reason that it's just that they haven't bought yet, it's just because it's not the right time right now. And you can expect lower click through rate. Of course, that means lower conversion rates too. But ways to increase your click through rate. One of the things that I think you really want to make sure is that it's really obvious, but there's something to click on that you can do this in a few ways, and there's a few things you need to do. One of them is make sure that you say right before or during that link text. Click here to watch the video. Click here to enrol. Click here to register. Click here to read the read more. Let them know that they can click and make sure you have it blue and underlined like make it look like a link. That's the first thing. Second thing is make it stand out a bit more. So one of the things you want to do is try putting that link on its own line separate. In fact, if you're if your click through rate is really low I would go and swap him the most obnoxious looking link for the next few weeks to just check that there's not something else going on. So if you had your current link is partway through a sentence and it's sort of within like a bunch of different blocks of text I would put onto a brand new line. I put some little chevron arrows before it and I'll make a capital letters. So it's now absolutely obnoxiously standing up in front and now we're basically saying there is a link and then I would go right is my click right now and the answer is yes. Great. Now I'm happy to dial it back a little bit. Now I'm gonna maybe take it out of caps and take the Chevron's out but before it and leave it in blue, but someone's on separate lines. See how that does. Oh, cool. I found a happy medium. That is lovely. Of course, we're obsessed with getting people to click because if they don't click the call and then go to the sales page and buy stuff, so we're not gonna go to lots of different ways of getting clicks. They're actually much more visual and this is obviously an audio podcast. So if you go and check out our click tricks book, which you can get for free by going to email marketing heroes.com/tricks you'll see there are 12 really creative ways of drawing attention to the links in your email so people don't scroll past them and they do see them so your click through rate is really about well here's something really interesting that we did a test or a couple of years ago. Now Rob Davies remember this, where we tested the impact of a subject line on the click through rate, and we even found situations where a lower open rate could steal from a subject line and a lower open rate could end up with a higher click through rate remember that

Unknown:

Yeah, and so like logic backs it up. Actually, if you really sit and analyse it, you know people talk about you better to have you know, if you do in sales calls, people say you're better to have fewer higher qualified sales calls and you'll get you'll get more people buying but if you have loads of sales calls because your sales goals are watered down and they're not as good and you lose momentum and all that jazz. And of course you've got high qualified people. The same thing is basically applying here. What that is, is you can get fewer more qualified people opening your emails, and therefore more of them end up clicking. So just a weird thing we found again, it makes sense if you really back at the logic on it, but effectively what it means is people think that have more subscribers, you'll get more opens. More opens means more clicks, and more clicks means more sales, and that linear logic is broken at every single level unless you're playing email marketing as a numbers game. That applies if your business is putting fliers through people's letter boxes to try and get everyone to know about the new restaurant you've just opened. That logic probably applies applies. But when it comes to what we're doing, it just doesn't. So what you're really looking for is you're looking for the highest ultimate click through rate that doesn't necessarily come from having higher open rates or having more subscribers. It doesn't follow that way. It isn't if I increase my open rates, everything else therefore will increase because you can do loads of things that increase your open rates. You can put a dodgy subject line like your payment is enclosed. If you do that you'll get shitloads of people open the emails, but they're just gonna be annoyed when they find that the email says Don't you wouldn't you love it? If you got emails with payments every day? You can't know if you buy my new ABC magic money printing machine, like they just going to be annoyed. So what we're really looking to do is to use subject lines in a way that optimises the opening of the email and the clicking of the link in that email to get the right little pool of people and that is just experimentation. The more emails you send, the more goals you'll score, right. The more emails you send, the more time you'll hit this and the more naturally good at it. You'll just become it's one of those things it'd be really hard for us to teach but you'll just get a knack for it.

Unknown:

One of the things to think about as well is when you write your subject lines for subject lines can affect the open rate of the candidate and affect the click through rate. And the kind of the conversions is to think about write your subject lines, which have different levels of intent. Right. So you definitely want to have in most campaigns not every campaign but most campaigns, it's gonna be suitable to have a subject line which is very bottom of the funnel, which is very like, you know, programme name, can't open programme name, closing soon, like very bottom of funnel the subject line tells them the whole story. There are times you don't want to do that. Because you will tell the whole story even if they don't open it up because that will tell me oh shit it is closing because a lot of times I've seen people do like the end end of a sale a flash sale and offer a programme closing where they're subject lines if I.

Unknown:

benefit but not not necessary, but whatever, but like they're gonna help you with the outcome. You also want to get out you're gonna want to have a bunch of subject lines, which are more obscure and pure, what we call compound curiosity, subject lines, which are much more obscure we're talking about in the past definitely on search on our blog, email marketing heroes.com for compound curiosity to talk because we talk about how we use that to drive open rates significantly higher. So you want to make sure that your subject lines deal with people so that from the outside I think it's basically I think of a subject line as the label on the box. The box arrives each day and application by email list. And sometimes the label on the box is something so obscure that I have to open the box and see what's in the box. But sometimes the label on the box needs to tell me that it's this particular thing because I want that thing. Yeah, so it's about like some mail you get through it's just in a cardboard box. You don't know what's in it. You open it from the Amazon guy who delivers it. And you find out what it is when you get inside. But when you get your new I mean, Rob and I both drink fuel when you get the fuel box. It's got he'll written all over it. He got I've got my heels here, I know. So that's what we're gonna do but with your subject lines, talking

Unknown:

about the conversion rate as the third one I think is an interesting one. And this is a much more brief one to talk about because a lot of the time basically if you're doing a good job of balancing open rate, this is a rule of thumb but if you're doing a good job of balancing and optimising the open and click through rates and all of your emails, you seem to be getting a high number of opens and a good number of clicks from those opens and the thing isn't converting. It's probably nothing to do with your emails probably most of the time that's going to be like a real offer thing the author is wrong the conversion mechanism the page you're sending them to is wrong, something about it is wrong. It could be as far back as you've got the wrong people on your list, but that's such a that's such a Get Out of Jail Free card that people come up with to to excuse the more painful realisation that actually their offers crap. A lot of the time we see it a lot. They just got I think I've just got the wrong people on my list. Well, you had you probably had the list first. That either way, that's your fault. You probably have the list first in which case you create the wrong offer for the list or you create the offer first in which case you won't attract the wrong people for the offer. Or as I think is largely the case the offer is just crap. And if the offer was better,

Unknown:

poorly poorly presented, you know it hasn't really got a good like the sales video the VSL the sales page just isn't really driving the isn't presenting the value and the transformation that the offer can can have. It's

Unknown:

sort of like, you know, you see that you see the girl of your dreams and you ask her on a date and she says no, I think you're really ugly. And then you go oh, she was just the wrong person.

Unknown:

It just idiots.

Unknown:

That's what's happening. You've suddenly pivoted and blamed it on her for being the wrong person. But yeah, so you have to hit me with that. And so largely speaking again, a lot of the time this comes down to people take something quite bland and put it on the internet, and then expect it expect emails to work wonders for it. Whereas actually if you just show up if you use your emails to get massive click through rates to something that's ultimately rubbish. It's not going to convert so again usually this is a point where when somebody brings us something they got this isn't converting will normally go Okay great. Let's go all the way back the beginning and we'll work through this in order are you getting Have you got people doing this great. Have you got people opening the emails to a good number could have have those people are they clicking? Because sometimes the disengagement thing shows up in the click through rate to buy them it's not just the open rate sometimes you'll have people who aren't engaged enough to open the emails just to get them out of their read number on the unread number on Gmail, but actually, they don't care. They're never going to click and look at anything anyway. So that happens. Are you getting good numbers, good numbers or clicks? Good. The page just isn't converting. It's probably the author or you're not sending enough data at it. We had it really recently on one of our q&a calls one of our members said got this programme, it's I think it was like $6,000 or something was quite expensive, higher ticket, and I'm sending it to a list of 60 people and we just did the numbers on it. Maybe we'll do a different episode on that economics, but we did the numbers on it. And so if you got anyone if you got one person to buy that six grand from your list of 60 people, you'd be doing better email marketing than everyone I've ever met. Like most people can't make that work. Because you do have to have a certain number of like critical mass looking at an offer of a certain price point. Anyway, that's an episode but that's a conversation for the episode. But if you've got like less than 50 people and you're trying to sell an enormously expensive thing, don't expect that you're not gonna make that and don't don't expect to make that many sales and

Unknown:

bounce rate as we sort of mentioned before is really about list hygiene. We've talked about how to keep your your email list clean. And we have our lol subscriber revival sequence that you have as a member of our programmes. And this is just about making sure especially with all the changes that have been happening over the recent months of Gmail and stuff, making sure that when you send an email those names that are on your email list, those email addresses you're sending to are still active, they're still they're still got a human going in logging in and checking those emails and reading them. And you can just do that with engagement monitoring. So I'm not gonna say much more about that literally. If people are not engaging with your emails after say 60 days, put them through a revival sequence to give them one last chance and then unsubscribe them. And speaking of unsubscribes What do you do about your unsubscribe rate? If you feel like you have a really high unsubscribe rate? First of all, people unsubscribe every single time you send an email that's just going to happen. And what we want to do is actually encourage people to leave our email list in the early days of our relationship with them, because they've just stepped in the door. We want to make sure we leave the door open behind them so they can easily step back out again. We don't want to leave it until they're all the way into our house. And they have to and we've shut the door behind them. They feel like it's a struggle to get out of what to make sure that we're upfront in that welcome sequence. We call it getting to know you sequence. We say hey, we're gonna show up every single day with an email that's gonna help you really have a taper to drink an idea or a piece of inspiration to help with remarketing if that's not for you, the doors still open it's cool, you can click here and unsubscribe.

Unknown:

And I think what a lot of people do is they hold off and are worried about sending emails because they don't want unsubscribes and then they just turn up to sell stuff and then when they do they're unsubscribe is a massive mountain which is bad for everybody. It's bad from your email platforms point of view. It's bad from female's point of view, what you're much better to do. And again, the trajectory what happens the result of what Kennedy just described is the trajectory is this everyday we have people joining our email list. Those people within their first five days have the biggest spike in unsubscribes but it's happening consistently individually for lots of people so it doesn't feel like some big spike out of the blue, and then unsubscribe rate remains quite very low for the remainder of time. It's sort of high whenever we do any big influx activity. So like when we bring a load of people in at once again, it becomes quite high because again, but relatively in their early days of being a subscriber. And then once we got past that first few weeks with us, they're unsubscribe, the unsubscribe rate is very low. Those people typically are around for a long time. That's what we're looking for.

Unknown:

And if yours is really high, like in general, I feel like bloody hell like 50% or 30% of people 20% of people just leave my list immediately or very, very quickly. I would be looking at what's the where you're getting people on your email list the intention with which they join your email list. We can't rely on tricking people onto our email list right. So for example, there are some activities which are notoriously high unsubscribe rate activities for acquiring new people on your email list. One of them is those bundles, right? So it gives you those bundles are is what I'm talking when I say a bundle. It's where maybe a bunch of people say 3456789 1030 Whatever, a bunch of people put a product into this bundle. And then that bundle gets advertised and people buy or opt in for free to get access to all of the things in that bundle and every single person who puts an item into the bundle, put a course or programme in the bundle gets a copy of the email list. And obviously there's GDPR compliance on this data compliance has to do with that people are saying yes, you can do this and all sorts of stuff. But because the person who's joined that bundle hasn't actually got a relationship with you. They have just joined a bundle. You could expect that from those things. You might have a high unsubscribe rate when you start doing email marketing for those people. Or if it's another external event where you're again, you're bringing people in, basically, you could expect high open rates from that activity, but that might be okay. Because if you know that yes, I'm gonna do that thing once or twice a year, not very often. And from that list that list of X people, I'm expecting a big Exodus during the first few weeks, but and then at the end it was really good subscribers. If that nets out a really good number of sales and return on investment for you. Then you can still do it but not all methods of bringing people in are created equal cold traffic running ads straight into a lead magnet. And the lead magnet if it was totally blank didn't mention the fact that you're going to actually continue emailing people that's going to have a higher unsubscribe rate than called to Hey, join my newsletter and has it which has also a higher unsubscribe rate. Then you did a guest training or someone's event people already loved you that joins your email list because they want to get more of you that's gonna have a lower unsubscribe rate. So remember, your unsubscribe rate is going to change depending on the source from which those people came from where they actually came from. And just monitor the actual net outcome of each of those things. As I said, you might be okay with a huge unsubscribe percentage from a certain lead source. That's totally fine, if you understand why that's happening.

Unknown:

So let's talk about what we're going to do with all this data. There's a couple of bits to it. The first one is whenever you build a new campaign, and you've run it for a while, so let's imagine you take over to a campaign and you run it live to your email list. The first thing you want to do is obviously look at the sales you'll probably notice those first because they tend to be the things we get like notifications about when that kind of thing. But then regardless of that before you really allow yourself to get emotionally looking at that, you know how much money did that make? Go back and look at the data so they have a frame of reference to look at the money from and then look at the open rate click through rate conversion rate, unsubscribe rate that kind of thing. Look at that and say Okay, great. Now I know those numbers now let's look at the sales and compare one or the other and try and fix everything it needs fixing improve it, I think it can be improved governance. However, you also then want to if you that automate that campaign, you want to check in on it like maybe once a quarter, something like that have like a 90 day check in where you're gonna go through each of your automations have them in a spreadsheet or something. Go through them and just look and go, Oh, that one. If I compare the date range or the last 90 days to the previous 90 days, the most recent it does to the previous 90 days, the all of the rates have dropped. This is crap, in which case you want to regret there's something shifted in the market, you know something's changed. I'm going to tweak those subject lines to make them work better. I'm going to tweak that the hook or that that the author of the angle, the angle of that offer, that kind of thing. So again, you want to look at them when you run them live. And then you want to sort of put a process in place for every 90 days and most of the time, you won't have to change anything most of the time. This stuff works for a long time. But every now and then you might go that one sort of not really working anymore. Also, you'll also spot things where you go oh my god, we don't even offer that anymore. It's still in that email. I better change that quickly because you made it years ago, and it still be making sales every day. Like that's not even the angle we use anymore. change that. So you want to do that stuff. And then basically you get to use these analytics and use these metrics to make your future campaigns better, both with quantitative data, where you look at it and go I can see that if I do this kind of subject line, it works better. So I'll do more of those but also just as the knack of getting better at this, you're able to one of Kennedy Kennedy nice benefit is actually really just we've done this for such a long time and sent so many millions of emails that now we just have a natural hunch as to what's going to work better when we get to use that first not always right but most of the time, and that's an advantage. That's just something that comes with doing it again and again and again and again is both looking at the specific metrics, but then also just getting a good feel for what's working better.

Unknown:

I love it. I love it. So there's some chat about some metrics. Of course, an episode on metrics from us would not be complete if we didn't talk about our Northstar metric that we use, which is EPS p m, which is your earning per subscriber per month. That is the Northstar thing. I'll tell you how you're doing month by month we should all have a spreadsheet which has the month along along the top or down the side okay, as the month and it has in there. How much are you earning from each subscriber for each month so you should have a cell for January 2024 And, and a number in that. And that number is literally the amount of money that you've made in that month. Let's say January, it's $100,000. And in and then you divide that by the number of subscribers that you had in January. And that's as 100,000 subscribers great. So $100,000 divided by 100,000 subscribers, that is $1 per subscriber for that month. Great. And then you the same in February you do each month retrospectively right February? Well, we had to we made $200,000 But we only still had 100,000 subscribers. So 2000 divided by 100,000 is $2 per subscriber in February. Good news. They are showing you on trend that you are getting better at email marketing, you're getting better at putting things in front of your email subscribers that they want to buy, because you just doubled your EPSP and you're earning personal data per month. And what's really nice is if it doesn't matter how big your list gets, because you're dividing the amount of money you made by the number subscribers you had, you're getting a consistent constant metric. So that's the that's the Northstar metric that we're really looking for. That helps you realise, hey, I'm getting better or why is that bogged down? Oh, that's because we strategically decided not to do any promotions that month. Fine. That's the reason why oh, that's because we launched that product and it bombed it didn't work. And we've already had a meeting about that had a bit of a cry. That's okay. We know why that is. Or there might be some surprising ones. You go, what the hell happened there. And you get to go and figure it out. It might be that you didn't bring in many new subscribers or there could be different reasons. So definitely look at your earnings per subscriber per month, which brings all of these numbers together gives you that North Star top line metric and then you can use open rate click through rate conversion rate, bounce rate and unsubscribe rate as the as the diagnostic analytics to figure out how to improve on your earnings per subscriber per month. Okay, so really cool stuff. And it's you know, it just allows you to get creative with all this stuff. It's amazing. Brilliant. Rob, are you ready for this week's drumroll please subject line of the week subject line of the week for our last my finger footing there. I was gonna say I lost my fingering but I don't think it sounds like I lost my ring that's on my finger, my finger ring anyway.

Unknown:

Anyway, ultimately, my human the subject line is my humiliating webcam mishap. And what I like is the idea of a subject line where people get to like paint their own picture immediately. Like it takes if I say I had this really humiliating web webcam mishap. It takes a third of a second for any grown adult to think of what might have happened there. And everyone's little version of it will be different, but I think it's suitable for them. Yeah, and they want to find out oh, my god, is that what it was? You know?

Unknown:

I love it. So that's this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. We're back again next email marketing Wednesday with a brand new episode. So make sure you do hit Subscribe on your podcast player. And if you have a moment right now, we'd really appreciate it. If you would go to your podcast player and leave us a review and tell us what it is. You enjoyed about this episode. Let us hear what you what you think about it helps others see how good the show is. And it also tells the podcast players that we're doing a good job and shows the episodes to more people and that helps us spread the word. Thank you so much for doing that and yeah, we'll see you next week.

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