What if your biggest marketing win is the one you’re ignoring?

You post every day. You write clever captions. You run ads, make videos, speak at events… and still wonder, “Where are the buyers?”

Here’s the truth: most businesses waste time and money on stuff that looks good, but doesn’t sell. The hard part? Figuring out what’s working and what’s not.

But today, you’ll learn one simple trick that changes everything.

It’s sneaky. It’s smart. And it tells you exactly which parts of your marketing bring in money—and which parts are just noise. Best of all? Once you set it up, it runs on its own.

This method slashes your marketing costs, saves time, and helps you grow your business faster.

Let’s dive in.

Useful Episode Resources

FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint

Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the psychology of marketing and the 9 things we use in all our email campaigns) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

00:00.00

Speaker

How do you know exactly what is working in your business so you can keep doing more of it? And how do you know it exactly and precisely what's not working to build your email list that's not turning into sales as a big old waste of time?

00:13.79

Speaker

I'm going to show you how to stop doing it by gut feel and doing it using cold, hard facts. Let's do this.

00:22.23

Speaker

Hi, it's Kennedy, serial entrepreneur, cat dad, and your guide to making more money from your inbox. Every email marketing Wednesday, we'll dive into strategies that have your subscribers throwing cash at you faster than you can hit send. If you're a coach, expert, or entrepreneur who's ready to turn those emails into cold hard cash, stick around. Welcome to the email marketing show.

00:46.33

Speaker

Welcome back to the email marketing show. Kennedy here with you. Absolute pleasure to be here with you. If you're not already in our free Facebook group, by the way, definitely go to Facebook, search for the email marketing show community. And we're all there hanging out talking about email marketing stuff, talking about the stuff we're talking about today and how to apply it to your business, as well as everything and anything to do with building your online business, doing awesome email marketing. Just open up Facebook, search for the email marketing show community. Now, for anyone who is just listening to this episode on the podcast players, going tell you now, this is slightly more visual episodes. You are probably better to come and join me on my new home over on YouTube, just for searching the email marketing show. And for all of you on YouTube, you're going really enjoy this. We're going to get into really practical stuff because here's one of the big mistakes I see entrepreneurs making all the time when they're building their businesses. I was just talking about this at an event. i was I was speaking at this event in the fitness industry about three, four weeks ago. And people asking me about building your email list and what what works, which kind of sources of subscribers brings in really good buyers. Because you know what it's like, not all sources of leads of subscribers are the same. going to find some people on some platforms just don't buy and others are like absolute gold to you. You might find Instagram brings in brilliant people who just buy from you, whereas you might advertise on YouTube and it sucks or vice versa. Right. And what we need to do and the thing I share with these people was we need to stop making our business decisions based purely on feelings.

02:17.83

Speaker

There's a place for our feelings. There's a place as an entrepreneur, it's your business. So you get to do stuff that makes you feel good. And you have to choose feelings based on what you think the best thing to do is for the future. But in terms of reacting to what's currently happening or what's been going on, you don't need feelings.

02:34.06

Speaker

You've got something even more reliable and that is facts. We have to, have to, have to know what is working in our businesses and what is not. so the way we do that is by having some kind of simple Google sheet or something with all of your important numbers in. And so wind you back in time.

02:53.21

Speaker

Now, when we had a much larger team, before I really shrunk the team and got really lean and really focused, there was about four or five of us in a boardroom. We used to meet together every single quarter. had my operations director, I had my head of product. We were all in there in this room.

03:07.27

Speaker

And one of the pieces of the meeting was I said, Hey, can someone bring me the information that shows us which of our channels of all the things we're doing, all the activity we're doing, we're doing Instagram, we're doing Facebook group, we've got a podcast, we're doing live events, do all these things. Can you bring in the report that tells me which of these things are bringing in customers and what is not? So We ran a report. i'm going to show you exactly how to do this in this episode. is what I'm going to show you how to do. And this is such a big thing for you, right? Because imagine this. Imagine you be able to do this. We brought up all the different people who've bought from us, all the customers from that quarter. And we looked up what was the original place they came in from. Where did they find out about us for the very first time? Because the job and the game of marketing and business is getting brand new people to find out about you. and turning them into customers for the first time. That's kind of the main part of the job, right?

04:01.13

Speaker

Getting brand new people who've never heard of you before, getting to hear about you, and then getting to buy from you for the first time. So I was asking, okay, of all the things that we're doing, which of those things are the most effective? Is it all the time and money that we're investing in Instagram? Is it all the time and money that we're investing in the podcast? What about the blog that we produce every single week based on the podcast?

04:21.13

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What about the fact that I fly up and down the country to all all across the USA, to Europe, all around the world, speaking at events? Is that really worth the effort? And what we found surprised the hell out of us.

04:34.94

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It was so surprising. This is what happened for us. This will happen in your business, but you need to know the data so you know what to do and what not to do. For us, we'd been spending six months, thousands of dollars,

04:46.73

Speaker

and hundreds of hours on creating content for Instagram. We had this amazing freelancer who was fantastic at her job producing brilliant Instagram reels and content and carousels and and stories, all this amazing stuff. And it was really good for my ego. It made me feel good. It made me look good.

05:07.03

Speaker

It made me feel like I was giving value. But it turned out, based on cold, hard facts of the data we were tracking, in six months, that entire Higher investment resulted in one paying customer and that paying customer was worth less than a couple of hundred dollars. It was a big time suck that wasn't bringing us back any return on the time or the monetary investment.

05:32.05

Speaker

one paying client in six months. And I'll tell you now, it took me far too long to pull the trigger on saying enough is enough because one of the things we all want to do is look at the things that are underperforming and pull up those those valleys and of in our peaks and valleys, we want to pull them up.

05:48.10

Speaker

But I don't want to do that. I want to make the things I'm good at, the peaks. I want to make our peaks higher and I want to kind of ignore the valleys. So before the end of that meeting that day, I had contacted the person, the wonderful person, lovely person who was doing our Instagram and said, look, we just can't continue with this because it's just not getting us any new results. And we're put it we're all putting in time, money and effort into this. but what we did notice is that podcast was bringing in the most customers for us.

06:17.97

Speaker

So what did we do? We doubled down on making the podcast bigger, better, getting more people to hear it because it turned into actual paying customers. So that's what we're going to aim to do. And we're only able to do it because of some very specific things that we were tracking. So let me show you what those things were. So this works in terms of every single time you have some kind of form that you bring new people into. And that might be an order form. More often than not, it's going to be a lead magnet, opt-in page, a freebie, somewhere where someone's signing up for your newsletter or to get some kind of free download. And so they'll often just look really simple. They'll be like, give us your first name, give us your email address. You might ask for a phone number. You might ask an additional question. That's kind of what they look like. But in actual fact, with every form we have, and if you're watching on YouTube, which hello,

07:08.45

Speaker

ah You'll see we actually have a whole bunch of hidden boxes that when you're looking at the form, you don't see when you're filling it in. But these hidden boxes, these hidden fields, which you just literally drop into your form builder and you mark them as hidden. It's all you do. You just click, I want a hidden field. You just check the box.

07:28.19

Speaker

to say it's hidden, it doesn't show up visually, but it's still there. And that means you can put, you can stash some secret information into that box. And we use that so that we can put information in there without distracting or annoying the people who are filling in the form. So what are we putting into that box? Well, every single time that I read out a link on this podcast,

07:51.16

Speaker

or every single time I put a link into my Instagram bio, I will use a different link. Now, not every single time I say on the podcast, I'll have one version of the link that's just used on the podcast.

08:03.98

Speaker

Another version of the link that's only ever used on Instagram. Another version of the link that is only used in our free Facebook group, Elon Marketing Show community. Another version again, which is only ever used when I'm talking on stage and it's put on my slides. Each of the locations that I could possibly be getting brand new leads from is given a brand new link.

08:25.79

Speaker

And that link is really, really simple. Usually you you will pretty up the link by making it look pretty. But essentially what you're going to is use something called UTMs. And I don't even know what UTMs stand for. I don't really care. It doesn't really doesn't matter.

08:38.96

Speaker

But basically, it's a way of adding some stuff to the link that someone clicks so that you can then put it into those hidden secret secret fields those hidden secret fields. So, um for example, um you would rather than just signing everybody to your website.com slash sign up, you might have one. Where if it's Instagram, you would have your website.com slash sign up and then a question mark. And that question mark basically says, don't do anything with it. but like This doesn't change the page. It's just a but bunch of information that's coming after the question mark. And then we put UTM underscore source.

09:14.74

Speaker

and that's the the source of this person, wherever they come from, equals and then whatever it is. So for Instagram, it's going to be Instagram. And I'm going to copy that whole link, yourwebsite.com slash sign up question mark, UTM underscore source equals Instagram. And I'm going to put that full thing into my Instagram link in bio.

09:32.47

Speaker

That means anytime someone clicks on that link and they go to my opt-in page, they're going to see first name, email address, and hidden in that hidden field, it's going to have passed in into the source box, the word Instagram.

09:45.66

Speaker

And then of course, when I put the link into my Facebook group, I'm going to have that word Instagram be replaced with Facebook group or FB group. What does that mean? That means that when I go to my email platform, I'm I can see where each person came from. And here is where the innovation really comes in.

10:04.99

Speaker

This is something I brought to the team about five or six years ago. And it's one of those things for attributing where on earth people came from. It makes it really, really crystal clear and almost bulletproof.

10:17.10

Speaker

Because what we do is we have two versions of that source field next to every single contact. So you think about every single one of your contacts has a bunch of fields next to it, in it, and it's in your email marketing platform, in your database. They'll have email address, they might have their address, their phone number, and you can add custom fields.

10:35.21

Speaker

One of the custom fields that I like to add is called recentSource. And every time we get UTM underscore source equals, and then whatever that word is, we're going to up we're going to have it update that recentSource field.

10:52.48

Speaker

So we know what is the thing that brought that person in most recently, OK? Nice and clear. But here's when it gets really cool. You're also going to have another field called originalSource.

11:04.91

Speaker

OriginalSource. So what you're going to do with that field is you are not going actually put anything in directly. You're never going to have that update apart from using an automation. And that automation is basically going to say, hey, you've just updated the recent source field. Should I paste it into the original source field?

11:23.85

Speaker

and it should update the original source field if the original source field is blank if it is empty is it if it does not already have something in it so if it doesn't have something in it that means we currently don't have an original source for that new person which means they're brand new so we're going to copy just using a simple automation in your email marketing platform we're going to copy that source into the original source field but if It comes in and it says, right, I've got a new recent source. Let's say it's a Facebook group.

11:54.23

Speaker

I want to go and copy into the original source box, but it looks and it says, oh there's already something in the original source custom field. It is not going to overwrite it because now when you do this, you now can look up any contact and you can see where did they originally come in from the very first time they entered your email marketing platform, your database,

12:14.59

Speaker

And what did they do most recently? This allows you to look back weeks, months, years into the future and look at where did my subscribers originally come from? And in my case, only one of the people who had bought something came from Instagram originally. Most of them came from the podcast, The Email Marketing Show.

12:35.92

Speaker

this podcast, right? And that meant that I stopped doing as much work on Instagram, certainly stopped investing as much time and money into it, and I did more of what was working. So to set this up, all you need to do is go create some custom hidden fields.

12:52.16

Speaker

in So you create a custom field in your email marketing platform called RecentSource. And another custom field called original source, you set up an automation that will put the recent source into the original source field unless there's already something in there. So do not allow it to overwrite that field, the original source field. Don't let it overwrite the original source field. Once you've done that, create a form and go and update your opt-in forms so and that you have a form field, which is called UTM underscore source.

13:23.10

Speaker

OK, and mark that to hidden. Now your fields will your forms will look no different when they're out there on the Internet. They look no different at all. It'll still say name and email does because that field is hidden. Now go update all of your links to that lead magnet so that you've got UTM underscore source equals and where that source is. Now you're collecting all of this data and now in a month's time, you can look back and go, great, where's all my customers?

13:49.32

Speaker

Let's look at their original source and you can see what is bringing in buyers. When you put a post here or when you advertise there, this is where those people are coming from originally when they buy. Because you want to attract more people who are buying. This is how you do it.

14:05.43

Speaker

And it's really, really simple and what's Beautiful is you only have to do it once. You set this up once and it just works. It's really, really simple. And it allows you to do more of what actually works.

14:19.82

Speaker

What is actually bringing in buyers. So bit more of a technical one for you today. Wanted to test the water, see if you like this or not. If you're like, oh my God, that was too technical. If you've got more questions about how to do this, let me know that in the comments.

14:33.43

Speaker

And if you're like, oh, I love this. I want more like this. Let me know that I'll make more videos like this for this channel. And if you're just totally lost off and you want something different, you've got a different question, let me know what your question about anything email marketing and conversion is in the comments.

14:48.75

Speaker

And I'll look forward to making videos and content about that really soon. That's it for today. I'll see you next week, next email marketing Wednesday with a brand new episode. See you then.