So What? Analyzing Your Email Marketing Performance

Well, hey, happy Thursday, everyone. Technically, I thought yesterday was Thursday. So today should be Friday. So I'm all kinds of throw off thrown off. But as far as I know, today's Thursday, and this is So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show, joined by Chris and John.

Uh this week we are talking about analyzing your email marketing performance. Um we love talking about email. Chris has an extensive background in email marketing. I believe it's maybe your favorite marketing channel. I if I could say so.

Um and email is one of those channels we talk about a lot because it's one of the channels that you wholeheartedly own as a marketer. You have control over it, uh, you can do what you want with it. And so today we are talking about email KPIs to measure, which metrics don't matter. Uh we're talking about measures, uh what measures are endangered by upcoming privacy changes. This is a big deal.

And then how to analyze your email list performance to understand your audience better. And I'll just sort of make the the the broad statement that email marketing is a complex thing. There's a lot that goes into it, but I think we're specifically focusing on measurement today. So Chris, John, email marketing performance. It it is indeed.

Um a couple of warnings up front. Uh with email marketing, a lot of the decisions people try to make are contingent upon what you do. So if you're trying to figure out like what the best day to send email is, and you send your emails on Tuesdays, you look at your data, Tuesday will always be the best day to send email because there's that there's a bias in the data. So just be aware of that as you anytime you work with email data, and frankly, any marketing data, um, there is always that danger that your activities do distort what's going on. Now, I want to start today by talking about um analyzing the data in email marketing to try and get some understanding about its effectiveness, its impact and stuff.

But one of the prerequisites that you'll probably want to have is access to either uh really good data exports from email marketing software uh or the underlying database itself. So here at Trust Insights, for example, we use uh an open source package called MODIC, uh, is the marketing automation software that uh we actually run the server that this thing runs on. And so for us to get the raw data, literally just log into the server and do a bunch of things. Now, really good providers um like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, like HubSpot, um, and other you know top-tier vendors will give you an API to your data or actually just let you access the database itself. Lower tier providers typically um they don't necessarily let you have as much access.

So um some of the things that we'll talk about today apply to everyone, some of the things apply to people who can get at the raw data itself. Well, it sounds like when you're evaluating provider, at the very least, there should be an option to export some of the data into a CSV file. Ideally, I mean that that's true of all marketing technology. If there's isn't an export to the CSV button, they they they want to keep your data and include and your money. So maybe maybe not choose them.

Um so let's start off first, Katie. What do you really want to know as a senior executive? What do you really want to know about email marketing? Um I want to know a couple of things. What I really want to know is, you know, is our email newsletter any good?

And so I'll bet you know that's a statement that's been sent to marketers, and then as a marketer, you're like, well, what does that mean? Is it mean number of opens? Does it mean subscribers? Does it mean engagement? And I want to know all of it.

But if I really had to prioritize, I want to know um, I guess first and foremost, you know the engagement rate. And so to me, that is the number of people who not only got it, but the number of people who did something with it, who interacted with it. And then I also want to know like, does it lead us to get any leads in the pipeline? That latter part typically is the part where I think a lot of people who are focused on email marketing forget about because we get focused on all the buttons in our software, and we're like, but but what does this actually do? So, number one thing for everybody to do, go into your Google Analytics account, right?

And go to let's go to audience here. And if you don't already have a segment set up for email marketing, let's let's create one. So let's create a new segment. And we're gonna do uh conditions, and I want to look at a source or medium that contains things like um actually let's let's do a regular expression. I'm gonna do mail, right?

And email and gmail and hot mail and so on and so forth. Um we're trying to just get at uh what traffic is identified this, or we also want to do the same thing for campaigns. So if we've got um campaign data, I'm gonna copy that exact same thing because sometimes uh you know come in as like SFMC uh as a as a source, um, and it may or may not have email. So I'm gonna just call this email marketing. And this is basic performance metric number one.

Is your email marketing are your email marketing efforts sending anybody to your website? Like forget about everything else. If you can't even get people to your website from your email newsletter or your email marketing efforts, it's probably not working, right? So if we look at uh let's go back to say January 1. Look at the year to date so far, it's been an interesting year.

And let's look at monthly. And so we can see that yeah, email marketing is sending people to our website. So this is this is a pretty good thing. I would uh I would say that at least in terms of um uh uh effectiveness, it's it's up there. Let's add in organic search just as a just as a side by side.

And there's our organic search. Interestingly, for us at least, um, as of sort of the middle of the year, email has sort of displaced search as as a as a traffic driver. So for us, it's really important, right? So, as a as an executive, you can now look at this and go, huh? We're we're doing good with email, but we um we probably want to talk about our SEO on a different show.

Well, but when I look at this, it makes sense because I know I have that insider knowledge of what we focus on at Trust Insights. And you know, it's no big secret that you know we're a small company, and email is our consistently focused on marketing channel. So I'm I would be surprised if email wasn't the top driver of traffic because it is the one thing we consistently do week over week over week and work to improve upon. Whereas, yeah, we do snooze a little bit on the other channels. Yep.

So that's a metric number one. That's what I was saying, that's KPI number one. If your email marketing can't even send people to your website, don't worry about open rate and click rate. You've got a pretty serious problem. Um metric number two, Katie, is exactly what you said, which is is it actually doing anything for us?

I'm gonna go to conversions, go to assisted conversions, or crank up the look back window to 90 days, get us uh the biggest possible view, and then just gonna look down here, I'm gonna switch to default channel grouping and look at the channels by assisted conversions or by last touch conversions, just to get a sense of you know what are the channels, what order are the channels in? Hey, email is a our top converting channel, both in assists and in and last touches. So this is a channel that's really, really working for us. Um if we want to get really fancy and you have uh Google Analytics set up, uh, Google Annex 4 set up, I should say. Let's go to our advertising session, which is poorly named, um, and go into our model comparison.

We're on the right spot. Now I go to conversion paths. I'm gonna go to time decay, which is uh the model we like. And now I can see at the beginning of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, and at the end of the funnel, email all the way through is is what's moving people through. So we this would be my second KPI is how much is email driving conversions, and then where in the funnel is it?

It's interesting. And so, you know, and this is a little bit of a side note. So for us, email is the channel that we focus on the most, which also makes it the most vulnerable if something changes, if we you know suddenly become unable to provide our email newsletter week over week, or if something changes with the server or whatever the thing might be. So it's while it's great that it's working, it's not great that we're so overindexed on email. And that's you know, the biggest takeaway from this is like, yay, email's working.

Oh crap, it's super vulnerable. It is, it is. Um, if we go to an even more advanced attribution model, we can see just how much. So this is the the attribution model that we built with our own software. And we can see here that email marketing represents 70% of our conversions.

Which is great because it's the channel we have the most control over, but also terrifying if I don't know, Chris. I mean, I love to use this example. Let's say you decide to go off to the middle of nowhere and share and butter forever and you go off the grid, bye-bye email newsletter. There's definitely risk with that. The one thing though is it is a lot better than we ran a similar report for the marketing over coffee list, and I saw it was you know 60% organic Google.

And so I'm beholden to Mountain View, which is even less control. There's a lot more chance of taking a beating from that at least. So at least it's uh in relative terms, it's better to have all the eggs in that basket. Exactly. So one of the reasons that we started the show talking about um why you probably want to have access to to the underlying data is that a lot of email software out there doesn't have the best UI for doing analysis because it's really the tools are focused on sending email, they're not focused on business intelligences.

So doing an analysis of your email marketing can be a little bit tricky. So one of the things I would suggest doing is like Katie said at the beginning of the show, make sure that there's a CSV export button like everywhere, or just a massive push this button to dump your data out. So I'm gonna switch over here to Tableau software. I've taken exactly what was on that screen uh that we just saw and just brought it into Tableau. Um so I'm gonna bring up our emails by subject.

Uh, we're gonna look at the number of people time number of times that each email has been read. And then the number of times each email's gotten uh uh click on it, and we can see sort of the individual subject lines uh that are in here. Now one of the things that people do the most wrong when it comes to analyzing email is they immediately go in and say, okay, well, it's it's clearly got to be you know the creative. Like our our layouts are terrible or you know it's not attractive, or calls to action, the button wasn't big enough, or the logo wasn't big enough. And it's actually most of the time the reverse.

The problem, there's a framework uh Bob Stone coined in 1968 called the direct marketing framework, which applies really well to email. He said there's three things in order that matter for direct marketing. List, offer, creative. Have you got the right people? Have you got the right offer for them?

And then it is the creative good. And you do it in that order. Because if you got the wrong crowd, it doesn't matter what you send them, they ain't gonna buy anything, right? If you got the wrong offer, right crowd, but the wrong offer, they're still not gonna buy a thing. And then you know, everyone spends all the time monkeying with the creative when in fact that's probably the least impactful thing.

So when we go in to look at like our emails by you know, clicks and subject lines stuff, it's actually the wrong place to start. So you know, it's interesting because we've we've tried to evaluate and audit our own email newsletter. Um, you know, I've I've made no, you know, uh bones about the fact that I think ours is it's it's too long, it has too much, but I don't have a solution. I don't have the fix because I don't have the data to say this is what it should look like instead. So if someone is sort of in this position and they're trying to evaluate what's working with their newsletter, you know, where do they start to figure that out?

Is that is that a whole different you know episode or are these metrics that they should be looking at? No, that's actually that's exactly the heart of it is is that list offer creative hierarchy. The first thing you want to do, you want to rule things out, kind of like uh you know, doing a medical diagnosis or detective work. You want to rule things out until what you're left with um you know you can trust. So the first thing you'd want to do is put put the the you know the clicks and stuff down uh and look at the the subscribers, right?

Try to figure out like do we have the right people? So let's go ahead and I'm gonna what I've done is I've uh I've did some prep work before the show to anonymize our email database because you just don't want to flash a whole bunch of email, you know, people's emails on screen or live stream. That's not very nice. Um I'm gonna put in just their IDs and um just a count of how much email they have read. Right.

And so what we're getting we're getting at here is you know, the these are people uh we've sent 40 emails so far in 2021. That's what that's what year this is, right? Remember anymore. Yes, yes. Okay.

Um what we want to get a sense is out of our list of like uh 22,000 people from this year. What what percentage of that list is reading, right? So I'm gonna probably break tableau here by trying to visualize the entire thing. Oh, look, it didn't blow up on me. Um and so we can see here, just eyeballing it roughly, you've got sort of that that fat head.

You know, they these are the folks who are like the super loyal folks. They'll you know, this person here, ID uh uh 1212. You've read 39 out of the 40 emails. Whoever you are, ID 1212, thank you for your support. Um start going down here into you know into the suburbs and stuff.

Once you get away from that, you yeah, here is ID 20273. He's only read five of our emails this year, and then you know, you get down here into the zero. So ID 183502, what are you doing? Well, so I have a question about this, Chris, because what you haven't told me is you know, when these people became subscribers, and so that person who's read zero emails, maybe they subscribe today and haven't seen anything. And so that to me is something you would need to add context for.

That's a very good point. Um, one of the things that's not in here, because it would require a database join would be to get the the when they signed up date to figure out like how long have you been enrolled. But at the very least, um, I wonder if I can pivot this with that blowing tableau up. I can. Um at the very least, you've got sort of a power law curve.

You've got your your big head and you get the long tail. Um, in this case, this actually isn't too bad. Um, this is reasonably healthy. When when you get to around sort of the middle of the pack and that people are still reading email of any kind, that's not bad. So it's that 50% mark.

Um, from my own newsletter, the almost timely newsletter, uh, it is it's a much taller front head, but it's a it's a it's a much thinner tail. There's more there's there's like a really two camps. There's the hardcore lists, and then there's everybody who almost never reads anything. So this is pretty healthy, all things considered. Um, which I'm really happy about because uh it means that the list fundamentally is in a pretty healthy place.

So it so go ahead, John. Oh no, that's Chris. Oh, it was Chris. Sorry, I can't tell you two apart anymore. Um I'm kidding.

Uh what's interesting is like what this doesn't tell me is that's great that they're reading it. But if you if we go back to that question you asked me is like as the executive, this doesn't mean that we're selling anything, which at the end of the day is the thing that I'm responsible for is the money. And so it's great that it's driving awareness, but does it do anything? Right. And that's where, again, going back to our Google Analytics data in aggregate, we can say, like, yes, there's at least we're at least feeding the pipeline with it at a greater rate, substantially greater rate than other channels, right?

So we know uh pretty well, like this is our top converting channel. Now, could it be better? Absolutely. Um, it can always be better. But at the very least, we know that the list seems to be reasonably healthy.

And from our attribution modeling, we know that this is the top channel uh that's driving performance. The next thing we might want to do is get a sense of okay, well, who are these people? Can we can we make any determination about that? And the answer there, unsurprisingly, is yes. Um what we want to do though is look at by domain, uh, who are those people, right?

So of the opens we've gotten this year, the vast majority by far, um, is coming from Gmail addresses from Gmail accounts. And this is something that again, for a lot of B2B marketers, they'd be like, oh my god, you guys are idiots. Um we're we're not idiots, I promise. That at least that much. One of the things that we do depends on the day.

One of the things that we do that uh goes against the the normal best practice is we allow people to sign up with their Gmail address or their their Yahoo address to uh to our email list. Why? Because the workforce has churned probably close to 50% in the last 18 months. And we care more about staying in touch with the person as they move job to job than than necessarily knowing what company they're from. And so we're okay with this.

Um they're up, other people have the opposite perspective. But this tells me a couple of things. One, uh Gmail is by far the most important provider. So from an email marketing strategy perspective, our reputation with Gmail has to be stellar, right? We if we get if if enough people hit that Marcus spam button uh in Gmail, uh we're gonna our our email performance could drop off dramatically.

Um to John's point earlier, when you think about um, you know, algorithms that could change, the thing that could endanger our results so far would be people reporting us a spam in Gmail. So that's one of the reasons why we have like big bright red unsubscribes, like because we don't want people taking the easier course of simply hitting market spam to make it go out of their inbox. We want them to use our really easy to find unsubscribe. Well, you know, it's it strikes me as well that companies that don't allow people to sign up with their Gmail or personal email address, that's a huge missed opportunity because think about people who are contractors, and so a lot of the workforce has transitioned into contract positions. A lot of companies have transitioned into only hiring contractors to save on costs, and so that means that a lot of people who want to get this information, they don't have a work email address that they would feel comfortable using because it's you know a borrowed or they're contracting for this, it's not a permanent thing.

So I would also say it's just it's a missed opportunity if you're forcing people to sign up with a work email address because a lot of people won't won't be able to use it. Exactly. Now the other thing that stands out here is that you have uh some organizations, some individual companies and organizations that you're you're seeing a lot of people clicking on stuff because this is all by domain now. This is not by individual person. So we see our friends here at Talk Walker High, uh 316 uh clicks, our friends over convince and convert, 125 clicks high.

Um and if you spend time looking through this, you can get a sense of oh, who are these people? Where are they from? Like here's one, um, you know, students.itu.edu. I I don't know who that is. I don't know, I don't even know what school that is.

Um, but it's one of those things that might be worth investigating, like looking into the the PII part, which we're not going to show, to see like, is that a teacher? Do we show up in somebody's course? And so on and so forth. That would be you know good things, particularly if you've got a book coming out. Um there's nothing quite so uh uh awesome as having a professor assign your textbook to a you know a 100-level course and like 800 people buy it all at once.

Okay. So we've looked so far to get a sense of okay, what um what's happening with with the list itself? Is the list fundamentally you know reasonably healthy? I would say I'd venture to say, based on the metrics we've looked at so far, that yeah, we're we're in a reasonably healthy state. Could it be better?

Of course. Um, but is it is it, you know, if it was much a sharper drop-off, I'd be worried that we've got a lot of dead weight on a list. I don't, we don't see a ton of dead weight here. So, Chris, this is all the metrics that you get out of the system itself. But there are other third party tools that you can pay for that can give you information like, you know, people's titles or you know, their position roles, positions, companies, if that's not provided.

And that's not what we're covering here, but I just wanted to make sort of the point that there are services out there that you can pay for that can help fill in those gaps. Yep. If you want a secret tip, HubSpot does it for free. You just load your contacts into HubSpot CRM and it auto-appends it for free, and then you address the API and extract the data, and then you don't have to pay 10 cents an email uh for that day append. Sorry, HubSpot.

You just made that sound super easy, but I'm sure it's not that straightforward. It actually is. It is surprisingly easy. Um, so that's the list. The one other thing that uh you should look at your list, and we're not gonna do today because it's a royal pain in the butt to try and extract the the data and visualize it without throwing PII everywhere, is your unsubscribe rate.

Like how fast are are you churning a list? How fast is your list uh uh departing? And for us, uh I ran the numbers. So we've had uh 22,000 people in aggregate on our list so far this year, but 4,000 have churned out, right? So we have our our current subscriber base is around 18,000.

So we've we've lost about 4,000 people along the way. When I look at them, they are predominantly corporate email addresses, right? So it's people changing jobs. It's not people saying, you know, I never want to hear from you again. Uh it is predominantly corporate addresses.

So, again, one of those other things uh where don't lock people into using a corporate email address because the moment they change jobs, you've lost touch with them. So our list feels like it's in pretty good shape. So now the next step in our hierarchy is the offer. The offer for an email is the subject line, right? When it appears in your inbox, it is essentially a one-line ad, right?

It's like a pay per click ad. You've opened up your Gmail inbox or your webmail or whatever, and you have all these emails with people and subject lines. Every single one of those things is an offer. And so the question then is, are your offers any good? Right?

Does uh what's what sort of is the the pattern, if there is a pattern, um, that would tell you like, yeah, this uh some of our offers were great, some of our offers weren't. So I've visualized here um just pretty simply our subject lines, right? And then uh the the number of reads on them. Now there's two things that are skewing this slightly. Um the first thing that's skewing it is that it this is an absolute count.

Um, this is not a percentage uh count. And the reason for that is because this is what I can get out of the system, and I didn't have time to do the computation, but um, the larger your list is over time, hopefully your list is growing, um, then the uh the more recent email should be doing better. But what we see here is that we've changed our newsletter branding a few months ago um to inbox insights from in the headlights, and you can see scrolling down through that that is doing pretty well, uh, it is a little bit more attention getting. Uh, we also see things like our blatant sales pitch, um, right? Uh that actually did pretty decently.

Uh, we've got another blatant sales pitch uh a little further down here. Um we've got a survey. So all these things are getting read. So these offers, um, you know, one of the questions that we always ask ourselves is are we sending too much promotional email based on the fact that you know we've got our blatant offers. Let's uh resort this by subject here.

We've got to order this by subject only. There we go. Um let's put a median line on here on read count. All of our blatant sales pitches are higher than the median. So I'd say it's actually probably safe to do not only promotional ones, but probably send a couple more.

Well, and you know, it's something we've talked about just internally amongst the three of us, is that we don't send a lot of sales emails. And so within our newsletter, we might have here's an advertisement for something, but it's not the main point of the email itself. It's something that's contained within the newsletter, but what the user is getting is a lot of other information about things that we're doing, things that we're reading, things that we think they should know about. We send, I could probably count on one hand the number of actual sales pitch emails that we've sent so far this year. Um it's probably I'm guessing, yeah, it's I can't good.

I have three fingers. So yeah, but that's it. We don't do a lot of it, and I think that we try to be you know protective of our audience in that way that that's not what they signed up for. They didn't sign up for us to be constantly pitching them. So when we do, we want to let them know, hey, this is what we're doing.

You know, you can ignore this thing. Exactly. Um, so we can see, at least from the reads, the the read count for now is a good way to benchmark like what kinds of things. Like here's a here's another uh sales pitch uh of ours, again, uh above the medium. So generally speaking, um, it is fairly safe to say uh we should we could and probably should send more promotional sales pitches.

So if you're subscribed to the Trust Insights and newsletter list, you're getting a sales pitch soon. Um but the read number for now is sort of your proxy for how good is your offer. Because if nobody thinks the offer's any good, they're not going to read the email. Now, here's where this is going to change. Once Apple mail rolls out in iOS 15 and Mac OS uh Monterey, anybody using Apple Mail is going to have a 100% open rate.

Because what Apple is doing is saying we're going to protect user privacy by essentially pre-fetching the email as soon as it reaches a mailbox that's managed by Apple Mail. That can be Gmail, Hotmail, anything your Apple Mail client is tied to. It's going to pre-fetch to an iCloud server, uh, and then it's it'll send that to the Apple Mail client when the user wants it. It will also pre-fetch all the links. It will pre-f uh it'll prefetch all the images.

So this is going to do a few things. One, your open rate uh data for anybody using Apple Mail, which is 50% of the market, um, is going to be completely hosed. So you won't be able to use open rates anymore as a proxy for for how interested somebody is. So the key takeaway here is do this kind of analysis that we're doing here with reads now, with your data now, before this privacy change takes place. Because after it takes place, your your open rates are going to be all over the board and none of them will be correct.

And the second thing to think about is um you'll have to do stuff like A B testing with using clicks instead of opens because uh it won't pre-click on everything. It will pre-fetch images in these emails to make sure there's there's um uh nothing bad in them and block tracking pixels. So that's coming I think in the next uh one or two quarters. Um so very strongly advise you to to do all this analysis extract your data now take a snapshot like download all the data you have in your system and archive it somewhere so that you have it um as a historical reference before this privacy change takes place. When what do you mean by pre-fetch?

Because you keep saying it prefetches so basically before the user even opens the email the system the server is pulling all the information to scan it to make sure it's valid not spammy so it's the the system is basically saying I've read it already so you don't have to worry about it. Exactly. It also means that's going to screw up things like um for example uh best uh day to send an email right because the open time will be the moment you send it because Apple servers will open it immediately right you can send that email at 2 a.m and it'll have like 100% open rate for Apple mail users because the servers read it and you won't know when per the person actually read that thing. That's one of the reasons why it's so so so important that you have Google Analytics set up and good UTM tracking codes in your emails because you'll be able to still be able to see when the user clicks on a link from your newsletter and goes to your website, right? That'll be the probably the most reliable way to do things like OpenTime optimization because you won't know from the opens themselves because uh this for 50% of your your list.

Um and because Apple Mail can be used with multiple systems, including corporate email systems, it doesn't matter. It's not gonna just be you know.mac or dot iCloud addresses, it's anybody who's using Apple Mail for you know Gmail, etc. and things like that. Um so that's the offer. That's the second thing to diagnose.

Um you can use reads. Yes. Question So what we're we're talking about organic email, but that does raise a question for me that maybe we can answer uh in another forum. But what does that do for paid email? Does that drive up your ad costs?

Does it you know change your you know return on ad spend metrics if you're getting that 100% that prefetch um information if that's what the system is doing, like how much does that screw with your paid email? Um it depends on how you're paying. So, like if you're doing performance marketing where you pay only for a certain number of clicks or certain number of leads, you'll be fine. If you're paying for opens and eyeballs, um essentially you're either your bills are going to explode because oh, look, you know, 100,000 people read your your your email this month. And you know, like actually five people did, but Apple read the rest of them.

Uh or um the vendor's gonna have to say, yeah, we're gonna pivot to some other uh metric because you can't trust open rates on paid emails anymore. Uh, again, the the best thing that you can possibly do is use UTM tracking codes in Google Analytics or you know, the analytics software of your choice. It doesn't matter have to be Google's. Uh, whatever you're using, use that with your emails. Put tracking codes in the URLs themselves, because that's something that is not going to be affected.

And you will know then if people came to your website from an email. But yeah, uh paid emails, uh, if you're paying for you know tonnage by the eyeballs, um, either somebody's gonna say, you know, the unscrupulous marker is gonna be saying like, oh yeah, we got an 86% open rate on this list. You're gonna pay $10,000 to send to this list. Um, and the honest ones will like, yeah, we have absolutely no idea what the open rate is. Fair enough.

Um so list it health. You look you look at the the how many people are opening emails. Your offer is you're looking at the opens. And then the creative, you can judge by the clicks, right? Because if your design is terrible and nobody can find anything, then it's pretty s obvious that you know you're probably not going to get a whole bunch of people clicking on stuff.

On the other hand, if you've got good design, uh, or at least you know a manageable design, you'll you'll get some clicks out of it. And if you're running an email newsletter that is informative, where so it's not just your stuff all the time, um, then you're gonna be sending clicks to uh a lot of different sources, not just one. So what we've got here, um when we s when we sort, um this is interesting. Our click rate or our clicks on our newsletters is a little different than our than our reads, right? So the inbox insights, there's only three of those issues um that are showing up for lots of clicks.

Uh and then it's a lot of the in the headlights stuff. Um, so that you know, that makes me scratch my head and go, huh? I wonder what happened there. Now, again, depending on the provider, you may be able to get the the click ratios. Um click ratios are can be really, really tricky, uh, particularly if they are dependent on the open rate.

Uh our the software we're using um uses a click ratio to send, I believe. So it's a little bit more reliable. So if I sort by that, again, still we don't have a lot of inbox insights in here. We have a lot more in the headlights. And it's not like ancient, it's like you know, 2020 stuff.

So it's it's not like it's from a long time ago. So that makes me wonder. I I wonder if our newer, more graphic-heavy design is actually not as good as the clutchy old um uh even longer newsletter that we used to send. Like our newsletters would be almost twice as long as it is now, and we're not getting the the clicks or the click ratio from it. So I'm wondering if our creative needs some work.

Um I I would vote for not a longer newsletter, but I don't have the data to back that up. No, what it what it my question though is so when you're saying clicks, so this is anything within the newsletter that someone interacts with, and that includes the unsubscribe, correct? That's correct. So I think what we would need to do, um, because I'm like 99.9% confident that every single link in our newsletter is uh coded in some way that we can differentiate the links. So I would start there is like what are the things that people are clicking on?

If you know we're not getting as many clicks because people aren't unsubscribing. Just as an example, hypothetically, then that's a good thing. But that's we would want to know what what it is that people are clicking on within those newsletters that have the higher click rates. Yep. And again, that what that's one of the things where again, if you have access to the underlying data, uh, I did not pull that here because that was like a two-day project.

Um, you can actually pull out every single link in the database that's been clicked on and analyze, you know, what kind of link it is and things like that. That is possible if you own the data itself. Um but um yeah, we should certainly we can certainly take a look at that. And you can do that somewhat anecdotally if you you go into uh your email stats. You can you can take a look at oops, I broke that.

Um you can see like what are the the most clicked on links within uh any given issue. Um you'll see uh you know, different stories, our Slack group, et cetera. Um the unsubscribe, the unsubscribe actually didn't get too many in this issue. Um so you can you can definitely pull out individual link by link to see what's going on. Um but extracting that from every single issue there sent would be a slightly more um uh challenging thing.

Uh really interesting comment by the way, I think from David, uh saying that uh good email marketers use the lack of opens over a period of times a signal to stop sending emails to those customers. That is a a good point. If your marketing automation system has nurture campaigns that are contingent on email opens, um, you're gonna be moving people through the pipeline that may not necessarily be qualified because Apple's opening the emails for you and maybe sending false signals to your marketing your your nurture campaign. So um you will probably want to change your nurture campaigns to clicks as opposed to opens. You know, another thing I was thinking about with that um with the previous report though is the click to send ratio if because the list has been growing at a decent rate.

So it won't that bias the older stuff when the uh list size was smaller. It would have depend on the click. It would bias the click ratio, but not the click to send because that should remain a percentage, right? So if you have more people clicking and you have more people on the list, that it should march in relative lock staff. Uh-huh.

And those are, yeah, and that's the percentage rate. Okay, it's not raw. I, you know, it's again, I sort of go back to I would need to look at those individual uh issues because it may be the issue where you know Chris rolled out his new book, so everybody's clicking to download it, or it may be the issue where uh we're replaying, you know, one of our webinars or talks or something like that. So I think you know, there's a lot of dependencies, and um, you know, those are things that just if you're looking at all of the data together, you want to make sure that you're digging into each of those individual components, just making decisions on those tableau charts isn't good enough. Exactly.

One other thing I would again, I can't emphasize enough the UTM tracking codes are your friend. So I'm gonna change this in Google uh analytics here away from default channel grouping into campaign, and this will sort of rearrange the funnel. And now you can see if you're if you're using UTM tracking codes well, you can see the individual issues. So, like we date uh we we change our tracking codes every single issue of our of all of our emails to see what issue it is. So here's inbox insights, right?

This is the August 18th uh issue. Uh here's the almost timely newsletter. This is the August 22nd newsletter. So you can go in and see what individual issues of your email newsletter are nudging people through different stages in the funnel. Um, and from a content perspective, that's super powerful to be able to say, like, oh, this is you know, this this issue really did a a lot a lot for us, or yeah, that issue really, you know, uh didn't really help us out very much.

Um, so I would say that is a super super important thing to do is to make sure those UTM tracking codes are are set up properly. Well, and for us, it's helpful because we made the decision about two months ago uh to change who was authoring the cold open. And so the content itself has changed quite significantly. There's still uh the insider data insights. If you subscribe, you can get those pieces, but the cold open has changed.

And so, as the person who's writing it, I would want to know is the content that I'm writing then detrimental to the subscriber base and they're subscribing at a faster rate. There it's not doing as much as it was when Chris was writing it, for example. And so we would have to say, okay, so Katie can't write that anymore. Chris has to take over writing it again. Just no, but as an example, you know, if I only have us as an example in another company, it might be a different case where it's like we're only ever gonna publish content in our newsletter about um blue walls, but people really, really want pink walls or whatever the thing is.

Like it doesn't matter. What you need to do is look and say, like, is it working? And the best way to do that, Chris, to your point, is to make sure every single issue has those tracking codes so that you can differentiate it when you're looking at it, you know, in any one of the numerous charts that you've shown. Exactly. So we covered a lot of ground today.

Um, but the fundamentals, Google Analytics or the Web Analytics software of your choice should be sort of the gold standard measurement of the performance of your email because it's people who've gone from the email to your property. And so you can see those individuals who've made that transition. That's gonna have I will tell you in advance, that's gonna have some uncomfortable moments because it's always going to be less than the number of clicks that you know your email marketing software reports. But uh with that, you can then start doing funnel visualization stuff right within Google Analytics or in Data Studio or whatever you want for that. So make sure that you're using those tracking codes, please.

Um when it comes to diagnosing your email list of for what's wrong, uh start with the list, then look at the offer, then look at the creative. Please do not assume the creative is a problem from the get-go and start rearranging the the deck furniture on the Titanic, as it were. And now today, it's a today is what September 2nd, right? It is a great day to get rid of anything that is reliant on open rate, because upcoming privacy changes are going to cause uh all kinds of heartache for marketers as new privacy regulations and things roll out and new privacy technologies roll out. And finally, if you're using email marketing software that does not allow you to export your data, it's time to change vendors.

It just strikes me as interesting. You know, there's so many metrics that you can look at with your email, and it always brings me back to the so what? You know, so you would ask me at the top of the show, like what metrics do I care about? And as we're going through it, I'm thinking, like, yeah, some of these metrics are nice to know, but can I make a decision with it? Can I make a change with it?

And so the open rate, yeah, that's it's good to know, but what am I gonna do with that? Can I affect that? The answer is yes, but do is that a priority for me, or do I care more about other things? And so I think that you know, as you're going through your email marketing metrics, going back to those persona statements of as a CEO, I want to understand if my email newsletter is leading to leads in the pipeline so that I can do more of it. Exactly.

And I would say, you know, when we go back to our attribution model, the answer to there is email's probably okay for right now. We need to give some love to something else to get some more balance, some more diversity in our marketing mix, because um, to you the point at the very top of the show, we are a little on the heavy side, a lot on the heavy side on one channel, and it is a risk that we we definitely want to diversify. So I would say for us, email is healthy enough that we can uh divert some focus uh and resources to we don't have to be all in on email all the time. If if your attribution models, however, show that you know you've like one-tenth of one percent of your uh traffic or conversions from email, it might be time to move some resources to dig into that, particularly if you're seeing diminishing returns on other channels. Agreed.

So, John, you're gonna do all of these things with your email newsletter now, right? Yeah, right. It'll be huge on email. Um, I had a couple questions come in via text. Um, John Blue and Jim B were both asking about open rates, and you totally nailed those.

Um, but there was one question asking just about list size. Is there any minimum for you as far as how big your list is, where you you know, below a certain point, you don't really care about the stats? Like, is there a number where you need to hit before everything starts to get statistically relevant? The main thing with lists is not the size of it, but how fast it's growing or not growing, right? So a list that is flat or slightly declining all the time is a problem, right?

It means that you're you're not getting any natural growth. And one of the things that that's actually can be a content problem, right? If your email isn't good enough to get somebody to forward it to a friend, like, oh, you should read this, you know, and get people to sign up that way, you've got a growth problem. You've got it, you've probably got a content problem. Your content's probably not very good.

And so I would be looking more at growth rate over time than I would be list size. I mean, yeah, if you have 10 people on your list, you probably don't need a whole lot of fancy analytics. Like you could literally ask all 10 people, hey, how's it going? Um, but for the most part, um, that that the growth number is important really important. Good deal.

The other there was one question too about in Gmail, and this is something I know Seth Godin still, you know, complains to this day about the fact that they had that transition where promotional emails went into its own tab. Is there anything new on the front of trying to stay off that tab? Uh that comes down to um the same thing you see people saying all the time, you know, which is add us to your address book or whatever, um, so that gets moved to the to the inbox. Um that still works. Um also uh there are behavior Google, no surprise, has huge numbers of behavioral metrics uh at its disposal to be able to say, like, okay, we see people are doing X, right?

And so um if everybody you know leaves your email unread in your in in their inboxes, uh probably not you know a great email. Um, if people are hitting mark as spam in your on your email, that's a really negative signal that uh you need to fix immediately because it's a huge, huge problem. Um of the things that uh you should definitely be doing if you're not already is using Gmail's postmaster tools, right? Uh Postmaster Tools is a free service from Gmail. And it tells you basically what Google is seeing, like how many people reported your email as spam, right?

So our our rate here is uh 0.4 at its highest. So this is really healthy. Um Google sort of um uh okay limit is one percent. Google's we're gonna just outright block you as 5%. So they're saying like if you if you get above 5%, we're gonna we're gonna whoop you.

Um and so our you know, over the last 120 days, our our rates are very, very good. Um there's seven different areas to look at in here, and this is probably its own show um to dig into what each of all these different buttons and features do. But you definitely want to be looking at stuff like your reputation. Like this is our our domains, reputation trust insights, and it's uh it shows that you know we're we're we have a good reputation. That reputation controls which tab you and you end up in, right?

So if you're if your reputation is crap, um you can end up in all sorts of uh you know suburbs you don't want to be in. Um same is true for all these different things, they're all just measures that Google looks at, but you've got to stay out of the the danger zones. And again, if you're an email marketer and you've done the analysis on your list like we were showing, where we saw all those Gmail addresses, Postmaster Tools is a place we have to be looking at at least once a month to go, oh, ooh, what did we do last month? Oh something went wrong there. Um you gotta do it.

Sounds good. All right. Well, I guess then we will uh head on out and we will talk to folks next week. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.

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