In the last blog post, we looked at the messages in the auto-responder sequence to make sure they are serving our audience. Today we’re going to go through that list again, but this time we’re making sure they also serve us and help us make money. Remember what I mentioned yesterday about taking care of our audience and only providing offers that add value to ensure long-term growth. Today is all about getting more people to look at those quality offers and taking us up on them.
Your best friend here is the analytics data from your auto-responder service and anything else you measure like click through on affiliate links etc. You may even want to dig around Google Analytics and see what helpful data you can find there. Setting up goals for example is a good idea to see what’s working and where in a funnel you’re losing people.
I find it helps to track three different metrics when it comes to this. The first if of course the open rate. If your subscribers don’t even bother to open your emails, you need to do something. Start by looking at the subject line and see what you can do to improve it. If that doesn’t work, it may be a problem with the subject matter. In that case, I suggest replacing the message with something different.
The second metric you want to keep an eye on is click through rate for any links in your email messages. If you’re not getting clicks, chances are that you’re either not writing a strong enough call to action or that the content and/or offer isn’t all that interesting to your readers. In either case that’s something you want to fix. Go back to what you’ve learned about your audience and what interests them and what they need to solve their problems. Craft the offers and content with them in mind. Keep going back to the questions of what they need to know and what they need next that we talked about in yesterday’s post.
The third metric you want to take a look at is unsubscribes. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that you panic and delete messages anytime you see someone unsubscribe. Instead I want you to look at the big picture here. You will always have some people unsubscribe from your list at various points in the message sequence. What you want to look for is spikes in unsubscribes at a particular message. Look at those emails. Is the topic different from what you usually share? Did you try to sell your readers too hard on a product you love? Rework those messages, toning down the copy, or even replacing it with something that’s better suited (either product or content) to your target audience and see if you can improve those stats.
There’s a lot you can learn from your stats and from what your readers tell you. Start to pay attention, start to listen, and start to take action going forward. You’ll find yourself becoming a better and better email marketer as time goes by. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s really about isn’t it? It’s about finding your audience, serving them, and making a comfortable living in the process.
