Lessons

Lesson Info

Setting Goals + Measuring Results

So now, I wanna start to talk a little bit more about setting goals and measuring results. So, we've kind of been avoiding talking about metrics and that's actually okay 'cause I really want you guys to focus on action. And, truthfully, when it comes to metrics in email marketing, there's actually only one metric that matters, sales. And by that, I mean how much money you make. The end of the day, any other metrics, list size, open rates, click-through, they're only in support of increasing your sales. This is the problem when we get too deep into metrics is we start to obsess about them without thinking about what they're actually for. And so, really, at the end of the day, we're doing this because we want to make more money. And so, if we're looking at these stats, we wanna do them thinking about how can we make more money, right? So, we wanna increase our open rate because we want more people to see our emails. We want to increase our click-throughs because we want more people to go...

to our shop and buy something. So, if you're tracking your sales, there are two things to pay attention to. One is sales for an individual email. So, here's the thing. We looked at subject lines that got opened. We talked about can we look to our call to action? Can we move that forward? But, at the end of the day, we also wanna see if the individual email made us money. So, we wanna look at sales for an individual email. And then we wanna look at your overall sales from email marketing. What was the bigger impact on your business? Now, if you have MailChimp and Shopify, these are really, really easy to track 'cause when you set up this app, you can see, "See detailed campaign reports "showing total revenue and number of products ordered." So convenient to be able to see that. It's not the only way, but it's super convenient. By the way, I don't get money from either one of these companies. We should fix that, right? I feel like I'm just promoting the crap out of them right now. All right, the other thing, and this does not happen for everybody, but depending on what level you are in Shopify, Shopify also gives you conversion details. So, this is the bottom of an order page and for privacy of my customer, I blocked out all of the details about the order. But, down here at the bottom of my order page, I have conversion details. So, the first collection they visited, which even without this, I would have a pretty good idea that they came from my email because I built that collection to send in an email. But, then it tells me it came from this campaign from my email newsletter. So, I know if that email came from my campaign. Now, even if you don't have this, you can still track sales. So, in general, the majority of the sales from an email campaign happen within the first 24 hours. Most of them happen within the first three to six if we're being totally honest. After that, the email gets shoved down in the inbox. We never remember. It doesn't really inspire much action. So, if you send an email and you get a bunch of sales in the next few hours, odds are pretty good it came from your email, right? You also see, like for me, most of the traffic, like in my online store, comes on days I send emails. Like, "Oh, look at the big traffic spike. "Oh yeah, I sent an email." So, you can generally tell if you look at dates of your email, dates of sales. You can kinda match those up. So, the question to ask is, "Did I make money today "that I wouldn't have made if I hadn't sent that email?" You start to be able to tell pretty quickly if your email marketing is working or not. Or, you know where people are coming from. You know where they're landing. You have a good sense. But, you wanna start to pay attention to that. Is it working? And then, the other thing you wanna look at is in what percentage of your total sales came from email marketing? This week, this month, this year? Start to look at the big picture of your sales. And again, if you're doing special events, you can kinda cheat this. So, I showed you guys that example at the very beginning of the class where before I had as much tracking information as I had, I created three separate discount codes, right? One that came from my Facebook, one that came from Instagram, and one that came from email. And my email kicked everybody else's butt. 48 times the discount code from email was used, three times for Facebook, one for Instagram. So, that was a pretty clear view of this was what email marketing does. So, start to track those stats. Now, once you're paying attention to these things, you can look at other metrics. So, you can look at your open rate. You can look at your click-throughs. And you can pay a little bit of attention to list size, but don't let it cause you shame. We're still not having any list size shame, right? And MailChimp and pretty much any other email service provider is gonna give you all of these stats. So, numbers are really just numbers, so with these stats, you wanna actually use them to figure out where you can be better. So, with an open rate, was your subject line effective? I keep using introducing in subject lines because people keep opening 'em. I'm gonna keep doing it as long as they keep working, right? So, was the subject line effective? The other thing you wanna look at with open rates is did you send the email at a good time of day for your audience? The only way to know with this is to play around, right? MailChimp is gonna suggest a best time and as we saw, sometimes it looks a little funny. Really, who's opening emails at 6:00 p.m.? Really, no anyone. They're either opening them earlier or they're opening them later. So, the other thing that I like to look at is go back to your email marketing role models. What time of day are they sending emails? Do you think that's the time of day that would work for your customer? So, you might wanna experiment with this a little bit, but you can kind of hone in from there and see what works. Mix it up, right? If you're going every Thursday, one Thursday try sometime mid-morning and the next week, just try Thursday night and see if there's a difference. Play around a little bit with that to see what works for you. So, look at your open rate and start to think about those things. Then, with your click-through, you wanna think about did your call to action work? So, was that strong enough? And also, where is your audience clicking? What links do they click on? So, I mentioned earlier that I used to add more images in my emails after this little bit of text, right? I would add a couple 'cause I thought they need to see all the things from the collection. But, it lost my call to action and it kinda took away the curiosity, so I started using less images and I started getting more click-throughs. The other thing I like about MailChimp is they also have this feature called the Click Map. So, if you're going into a campaign, you can go to Links, you can look at Click Performance, but you can also look at the Click Map. I'm a visual person, so I like to see exactly what they're clicking on. So, you can see a few people clicked on my image. Some people clicked on the link in my text. That's why I put it there. The highest one was the button. Surprise, surprise, you put a big button that says "Shop Now" and people are gonna click on it. And then, just below that was the one in the PS. I use a PS a lot because people click them. There's actually no reason for this. It's literally, basically the same information as was right there. They're not gonna lose it, but, statistically, people click on links in a PS and my Click Map pretty much shows that that's the case. And then I got a tiny handful of clicks on my social media profiles and things like that. But so, I love the Click map because this tells me things. I used to think, "Wow, people are really clicking "on those images." No they're not. So, at the end of the day, it doesn't exactly matter where that image goes because very few people are clicking on it. They're clicking on the button. So, you wanna play with that and pay attention to your Click Map. Again, I'm showing you the things that have worked for me. And I run a product-based business, so a lot of it is gonna apply to you, but not all of it is gonna apply to you. So, this is the point now where when you're taking action, this gives you data. The reason I can stand up here and give you all of this information is because I sent almost 60 emails to my list last year. That's a lot of data. That gives me a lot of practical knowledge in terms of what works. And so, once you start emailing your list on a regular basis, you start to see this is what's working and what's not. And maybe you realized you need more text or you need less text or you need less marketing speak and more of your personality coming through. Whatever it is. But, you start to pay attention to these stats and see what's working. But, I don't want you guys to get too hung up on metrics. Metrics are a way for you to tweak the process, but, at the end of the day, I want you to focus your energy on your process-based goals. And as I mentioned at the beginning, you can set process-based goals that are one and done or that are recurring. So, a couple of examples might be things like adding an opt-in form to your website by May 22nd. That's a one and done. But, you might say, "Okay, once a week, "I'm gonna make a call to action on Instagram" "to get people on my list." Or, once a quarter or once every six months, I'm gonna hold a big list-building event like an exclusive product launch or a sale. Now, those aren't the only emails that you're gonna send out. Annette, you're gonna send out more than those couple. But, you might make that part of your process-based goal. And then, you might say, "I'm gonna email my list three times a month." Or, "I'm gonna email my list every Thursday." Whatever it is. So now, I actually want you guys to commit. So, I want everybody to come up with three process-based goals that you're gonna set for your email marketing. So, they can be one and done goals. I would say, if you need to, put one one and done goal on there 'cause I think most people have at least a little bit of optimization or something they want. But then, at least two more process-based goals, whether it's making call to action or committing to what day of the week you're emailing your list. Whatever it is. And I'd love to just hear from some people. So, who feels really good about their? Everyone's taking notes. Who feels good, who's got some process-based goals and they're feeling ready? Tanya, what do you have? I'm going to test sending at a different time in the morning. Ah, perfect. And then, what else? You are already committed, right? You're already doing once a week? Yes. Is there anything else you're gonna add in there? I'm going to work a little harder to make launches into a more of a list-building activity. Excellent, anyone else set any? You guys are all frantically scribbling. (audience laughs) I think I'm going to try to email every week and try to optimize my website to collect emails and also remind my social media followers that I have a list. And you may want to, in terms of optimizing your website, experiment with your opt-in incentive a little bit. Since you're finding that one is not working as well, you may wanna try to add something else in the mix there. Perfect. Then, what you wanna do, in terms of actually measuring, is then conduct a monthly check-in. So, the first thing is did you actually meet your process-based goals? Because if you didn't, then none of the rest of this matters, right? If you didn't actually email your list last month, then it doesn't matter, right? So, did you email your list? Did you make your process-based goals? Were you making those calls to action on Instagram? And if you didn't, why not? Do you actually have to schedule the time in your calendar? Do you have to put an alert so that you're like, "Oh yeah, it's Tuesday. "I should probably remind my Instagram to join my list "for whatever reason." So, how can you make them happen if they didn't? And then, you can look at how much revenue did my email marketing generate this month? And if it's what you wanted, awesome. And if it's not, what do you need to do differently? Is there anything that you need to improve? Go back in, was it the emails themselves? Do you need stronger calls to action or better images? Or, is it that you just need to work on growing your list? So, every month, you kinda wanna do those evaluations. I, personally, like to compare each month to the same month of the previous year, not the last month. Because we all know that in our kinds of business, things ebb and flow, right? There are just certain months where stuff sells better. Some months where it's easy. And there's some months where you're like, "Is anyone visiting my website at all?" So, I like to compare, right? Did I make more money this May than last May? And then I'll look at how many times did I email my list this May versus last May? Or, did I do anything different that drastically changed my revenue? Like I said, that sample sale, I float that around, so if it's like, oh, last year I did it in April and then this year, I didn't make as much money in April, I'm not gonna get down on myself because I'm like, "All right, I moved the sample sale to July. "Okay, not a big deal. "I'm not gonna stress out about it." But, I like to compare because I think it's a truer analysis than being like, "Oh, well last month I made so much money.", when last month was December and now you're in January. Well, of course you made so much money in December. So, I like to compare month to month as opposed to the previous one. Then, you also want to assess the big picture annually. So, how many times did I email my list in the last year? Even with your best intentions, were you close? Did you get there? Like I said, I don't use a weekly strategy, but clearly, if I emailed my list almost 60 times last year, I don't need a weekly strategy to stay committed. I clearly emailed my list enough. And then, how much money did I make this year because of email marketing? And then, you may also wanna look at list growth. Quite frankly, I usually have no idea for that question. It go bigger. That's usually all I know 'cause I'm way more focused on how much money I made, right? But, I'll look at that a little bit. And really, ultimately, how did it impact my business? That's why we're doing this, right? Did it make a difference? Hopefully, it did. If it didn't, go back and reevaluate. What's not working? Think the other question that may come up is, "Is there ever a point in time "where you should dig more deeply into the data?" This is really a pretty broad strokes thing and I would say the answer to that is yes, possibly down the road. But, you wanna be making probably a lot more money. If you're at the point where you're starting to get close to six figures or you're really needing to make a huge, huge jump, that's when I think you can start to dive a little bit deeper into this stuff. But, for most Makers, doing this kind of thing and focusing on the process is going to have a big impact on your revenue. And then, you can look at those metrics just to do better at sending out those emails. What's working for my audience? What are they responding to? Without having to worry about all the tiny little details. When you're ready for that, it's because your business is gonna be big enough that you're gonna hire someone to pay attention to those details for you, right? That's our goal, get big enough that you can hand those off. So, any questions about measuring, metrics, anything like that? Pastyvines, this was one question that just came up. They just wanna know a little bit more about your take on social media and how it relates to emails and blog posts if you're just getting started. Is it something where you want to establish your social media before you blog? Blog first, then social media? I know that's a little bit beyond this class, but-- So, actually, what I will say, and this is something that I taught in that how to build a business while learning your craft class, email marketing is 100% number one priority. I don't care what else you're doing. Email marketing should be number one because no matter what you're doing to grow your business, you can be growing your list. If you're at a craft show. If you're selling online. If you're using social media to grow. If you're using your blog to grow. All of that feeds into your list. So, list is number one. The blog versus social media focus is, I think, a little bit trickier because it depends on your product type and your skillset. I have personally found it much easier to build a blog than I did to build up my social media following, but some people go the reverse. And actually, I'll just give you a tiny preview since our blog class is coming up next. One of the tricks that I like to use is I like to steal content from my social media to feed my blog and then vice versa. So, we're gonna be talking about that. So, what I want to help you see is that it doesn't have to be an either or. We wanna kinda pull them all, seamlessly, into the same thing. So, again, I don't advocate sending every blog post out to your email list, but there's definitely places to reuse content. It's not like I'm creating three completely separate sets of content for all those things. Images that I used to promote my products go into my email marketing. They might get used in a blog post. They might get posted on social media. So, at the end of the day, you can make all of them work because you can use all of your content for everything.