“Where are subscribers coming from?”
“Where are the sales coming from?”
“Where can I scale and optimize more?”
The problem with email marketing is that there are a lot of aspects and corners to learn about.
The good thing is that you don’t have to learn it all to make email marketing work for you.
Like a Lego set, email marketing and automation are best put together with blocks.
Depending on where you are in your email marketing journey, you ask different questions and build pieces to get those questions answered.
Email marketing has two main components: automation and content.
I’ll be diving into the content next week, but let’s tackle the automation for now.
Mainly because I’m such a geek with it, and I know most people struggle with it.
Email Marketing Automation
Automation is broken up into three parts.
- Analytics
- Audience
- Activities
Analytics are what you want to measure. They are what you want to look at to get answers to your questions. Have you ever wondered where your subscribers first find you?
Audience are your subscribers (duh). Subscribers could be broken up into new, old, customers, cold, and whatever other kinds of subscribers you have.
Activities are the events or behavior of your subscribers. This could be buying or not buying something. It could also be clicking specific links, a period of time, or signing up for a waitlist.
Let’s tackle finding out “where are the new subscribers coming from?” as an example and learn about the “analytics” part.
Analytics
Your subscribers could come from:
- Lead magnets on your site.
- Specific pages on your website.
- Content Sources like blogs, social media, ads, etc.
- First entry points like a purchase, lead magnet, or ad.
- Referral Sources like another person, a podcast you guested on, etc.
There will be so many things you want to measure. But you don’t want to lock yourself in where you can’t measure or track anything new.
That’s why, when starting, you may only want to track where subscribers are coming from.
It gives you a good sense of what your subscribers are interested in and builds the muscle for you to put tracking into your automations regularly.
This begs the question…
“How do I set up tracking for my emails?”
Most of the questions you’ll ask are multiple-choice questions. They have many choices, but there can only be one answer.
If you’re lucky enough to have custom fields within your email service provider, like ConvertKit, that’s where you store your subscriber’s answers (aka the value of what you are tracking). You don’t want to use tags, and I’ll show you why in a second.
You can check if a subscriber’s custom field is set. If it’s blank, you set it.
With tags, you’ll have to check the subscriber for every tag that represents an answer before deciding whether to set it.
For example:
You have five lead magnets and want to know which one attracts subscribers to your list.
Have a custom field called “lead_magnet_origin” set the first time a subscriber comes onto your list.
Steps:
- A new subscriber comes onto your list
- Check and see if “lead_magnet_origin” is anything but blank
- If so, then don’t update it. (This means that the subscriber is already on your list and opted in to receive a different lead magnet.)
- If blank, then update the value with “[Lead Magnet Name]”
If you used tags for this, you’d have to check to see if any of the five lead magnet tags exist first.
This limits you when you want to add lead magnets in the future.
In ConvertKit, an analytic block looks like this:
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Simple, effective, and easy to use from the start to help you answer some questions. Dropping these into any automation you create will help you in the long run when you ask more questions.
Next, we’ll dive into the Audience part of email marketing so that you start down the road of right message, right person, right time.
