As you set up more entry points for your funnel and start building your list, you’ll need to monitor a few different metrics to ensure that what you’re doing works, as well as to find ways to improve. Two parameters to look for when it comes to your email list are open email rates and email link click-through rates.
An open means that your list member opened the email to consume the content. A click-through means that the list member not only opened the email and read it but also clicked a link that you provided to them.
To monitor open rates and click-through rates, you’ll need to check your autoresponder directions, but more than likely, you can find this information within the dashboard or back office of your system.
One thing to note about click-through rates is that you need to allow the autoresponder system to insert tracking on your links so that you can track that option. This is usually automatic simply by checking a box permitting them to track your links. You don’t have to do anything special to monitor open email rates as that knowledge is already available to you through your autoresponder dashboard or back-office, depending on your system.
Know the Industry Averages
Do some research on your industry to find out what the open rates and click-through rates are typically for this type of product or service. You can also look at your autoresponder service’s benchmark information to find out how your numbers match up to what they say is the average. You want to shoot for average at least or above-average results.
Know Your Numbers
Regardless of what the industry averages are, you need to know your own numbers for open rates and click-through rates. You can gather that information by using your autoresponder dashboard. Make sure you implement link tracking in your email messages for the best results. Each system works slightly differently, so always look for the directions.
Learn Tips and Tricks to Improve
Your autoresponder likely gives you tips to improve your email marketing. They want you to succeed. Go through the training they provide and use some of the information to improve your open rates and click-through rates. Focus on subject lines, segmenting your audience correctly, and including the right calls to action for the person who is consuming the email message.
Monitor Stats Regularly
Set up a schedule to monitor these metrics at a minimum of monthly but also before, during, and after any marketing campaigns or launches. When you notice an opportunity to improve your results, take the time to implement them. Don’t skip doing the essential things because every single tweak you make will add up.
Monitor, Improve, Repeat
As you move along in your marketing campaigns, building your funnel, and working on pleasing your ideal customer, you’ll want to use the information you learn from monitoring these metrics to do a better job targeting your ideal audience based on their intent for wanting the information you’re providing. It’s a work in progress and will not be perfect ever because everything keeps changing. Your job is to monitor, tweak, improve, and repeat.
he more you focus on what’s important regarding your metrics, the more you’ll be able to reach and please your ideal customer.
Ask Your Readers What They Want To Hear About (Or Need Help With)
t’s probably becoming clear to you that to help your audience, you need to create products, information, and content that they want to use and to hear about or information that solves their problems. Anytime you need inspiration for content or product development, the best thing to do is ask your readers.
To find out what your audience wants, you’ll have to ask them. Here are four ways to ask your audience what they want.
Send Out a Survey via Email
Make it a habit to automatically survey anyone who comes to your list. You’ll need different surveys based on their entry point because a survey to someone who bought product A will be different from someone who purchased product D or who joined your email list due to downloading a freebie or joined due to a blog post they read.
Host a Q & A Webinar or Live Event
If you do have a good following hosting a live event online is a fabulous way to create buzz, spread brand awareness, build your email list, and more. But you can also use this format to engage with your readers to find out what they really want and need from you. Promote your webinar by running retargeting or remarketing ads on Facebook or other social media providers and announce it via email and on your website to get more people to participate.
Ask for Their Questions on Social Media
You can also simply ask your audience to submit their questions to you on your most active social media platforms. For example, ask your readers to submit questions to you on Instagram, Facebook, or “below” in your YouTube videos. Collect the questions and answer them one at a time to create more content but also let their questions guide your product creation too. You may notice gaps in education or a need you didn’t notice before by allowing and encouraging them to ask more questions.
Call Your Customers
This may make you nervous, but giving your customers a quick call no matter how much or little they spent can garner a lot of information that you can use to develop more products as well as content for marketing and educational purposes. You can set this up by offering a free 15 discovery call to your site visitors, but you can also simply give your customers a quick phone call to say thanks. You may be shocked at what you can learn with this one simple method.
When you ask your audience, sometimes you’ll receive information from them that is not useful; that’s okay. Not everyone is really your ideal audience, even if they’re on your email list. However, most of the time when you proactively engage with your audience and ask questions, while actually listening to them, you will gain insight into your ideal audience which is going to inform your next products, the content you create to market those products, and how you engage with them.
Calculating What Your Subscribers Are Worth
You may feel as if you’re in the dark sometimes when you have an online business that relies on email and content marketing to get the word out about your products and services. However, the truth is, you have even more power over your marketing and product creation than ever before because you can calculate what your subscribers are worth on average, which is going to inform the marketing methods you deploy as well as how much you spend developing the products.
Knowing your email subscriber value is a critical piece of knowledge that can help you make smart decisions.
To figure out how much your subscribers are worth you’ll need to gather the following information:
How Many Subscribers Do You Have?
Before you count your entire list, make sure you clean up your email list first. If you have people on that list who have not opened your emails for the last 120 days, don’t count them. Only count your active average opens as your list number. You may have 100K people on your list, but if only 10K regularly open the messages, then you should only count the 10K.
Know Your Revenue Numbers for the Last Period
This can be tricky if you’ve not been in business very long. The best figure to use is the last year or an average of the years you’ve been in business. These numbers are only estimating, but they will help you make better decisions about your expenses, nonetheless. So, if due to emails you sent out, you made $50,000 during the period in question write that down. Don’t count sales that happened using other methods, only due to an email you sent.
Then You Divide
Now that you have your numbers determined, you can figure out about what your subscribers are worth.
The formula is: Revenue During the Period Divided by The Number of Subscribers.
For example, let’s say that you have a list of 20,000 subscribers (after cleaning the list), and you earned $50,000 during the period you’ve chosen. Now you just plug in the numbers to the right place. $50,000/20,000 subscribers equal $2.50 dollars value per subscriber. That means every single subscriber you earn is worth about $2.50 each period. So, if your revenues were from the last 120 days, you can potentially make that every 120 days, but if it was based on a year or an average of years, consider it potential annual earnings.
This information will help you make better choices when it comes to cash flow predictions, determining how much you can spend to get a new customer, how much you can afford to market, and more. Knowing your subscriber value will inform your product creation budget as well. Plus, you can use that number to invest in raising that number. Maybe you need to sell more products, or charge a higher rate, or send out more offers. Either way, you’ll have a lot more information to help you improve your email marketing campaigns.
