Episode 230: KPIs to Track for Email Marketing

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The Essential KPIs to Track For Email Marketing

If you’ve got an email list, you need to be tracking KPIs for your emails so that you can continuously improve what you are sending your people and today I’m covering the essential KPIs to track for email marketing in this episode.

What’s a KPI? A key performance indicator – what exactly it’s indicating depends on what you’re tracking, but lucky for you – in today’s episode I’m not only going to share what KPIs to track for email marketing, but also what those numbers tell you as you track them.

Add these KPIs to your current KPI Tracker – or if you need help getting started, checkout my KPI Tracker Template and my KPIs & Marketing Workshop for a deeper understanding of how these KPIs can work for you.

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Join me on Monday evenings at 4:00 pm Pacific time/7:00 pm Eastern time for my weekly YouTube Lives!
Looking for a podcast production team? Check out Gaffin Creative!
This week’s action step: Add these KPIs to track for email marketing into your own KPI Tracker, get my KPI Tracker Template for help getting started and look into my KPIs & Marketing Workshop for a more in depth look into this topic.
This week’s book recommendation: The Earl Next Door: A Regency Romance by Ashtyn Newbold
Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield

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Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!

*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate

If you’ve got an email list, you need to be tracking KPIs for your emails so that you can continuously improve what you’re sending to your people. What’s a KPI? It’s a key performance indicator. What exactly it’s indicating depends on what you’re tracking, but lucky for you in today’s episode, I’m not only going to share the email KPIs I recommend tracking, but also what those numbers tell you as you track them.

You’re listening to episode 230 of the Chasing Simple podcast. And I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by Gaffin Creative, the best podcast production team out there.

How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And most importantly, How do I put it all together to market my business strategically?

Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head when you think of marketing. Welcome, friend. This is Chasing Simple, where practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist, speaker, educator, and author of Chasing Simple Marketing.

I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business, so that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.

When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients, such as the Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell.

Reading in our hammock, watching GameCock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me. If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing Is the thing that they started their business to do, which is why I’m here to help make marketing simple and less time consuming so that you can spend less time on your marketing and more time growing your business and doing what you love each week.

I’ll bring you transparent conversations. actionable steps, and judgment free community to encourage and equip you. So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever you drink of choices and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips, and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business.

Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? When it comes to creating your monthly content calendar and sitting down to create your content because you’re batching it, right? The first step is not writing in the monthly calendar, It’s not even writing your categories and important dates on the calendar.

If that’s where you’re starting with your content planning, well, all you’re creating is a plan. But what you need is a strategy. What’s the difference? A strategy is like the inner structure of a building, while the plan is the decor. A strategy is what helps you achieve your goals, and your plan is how you achieve them.

Your strategy is where you’re leading your audience, and your plan is what you’re talking about and when. Without having a strategy first, putting together a plan will simply mean pulling ideas out of thin air. So how do you start with a strategy by starting with your goals and working backwards to ensure that you’re moving your audience toward them?

What are your yearly goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals, and weekly goals? How can you translate them into content? Your audience wants to ingest. You’ve got to consider those questions before you even begin deciding what it is that you’ll post about. And if you want a simple way to create both your strategy and your plan, grab your chasing simple content planner.

The planner is my number one bestseller, and for good reason too, because this massive, more than 130 page planner was designed with strategy in mind. It’s not merely a place to write down what you’re going to post and when. Yes, that’s part of it, but first, you’ll walk through intentional pages full of strategic questions to get your brain moving in the right direction before you even start writing down your topic ideas.

In addition to the traditional calendar pages, you’ll find yearly planning pages, monthly prep work, monthly reflection questions, repurposing worksheets, and so much more. If taking your content to the next level is a goal of yours, the Chase and Simple Content Planner was created for you. Grab yours for just 27 at amandawarfield.

com slash planner. When it comes to KPIs for emails, there are two categories that you’re going to want to pay attention to. So first and foremost, we’ve got those that Are not going to be accurate, but you can use them for general information. And then we’ve also got those that are going to be much more accurate and the difference here lies in new data protection laws that have been coming out over the last few years, where.

A lot of times people have to actually opt in to allow you to know some of these. Pieces of information, and so those are going to fall under the not so accurate, but good still for general information usage. The reason they’re still worth looking at is because you can still see trends, even if it’s not 100 percent accurate and trends can still be helpful for comparing our numbers against ourselves.

And it’s not going to be helpful for things like, well, what’s the average? Because. And that’s what you’re seeing is not, it’s not going to be accurate, but it’s good for, okay, here’s where I am. How can I improve this? Those kind of numbers. So just a heads up on that. First of all, let’s go ahead and dive into those ones.

The not so accurate ones. There’s really just two that I truly pay attention to and that I pay attention to for my clients. And that would be one open rates and two click through rates. Now open rates, again, not going to be super accurate. It’s not going to be. Yes, these are my exact numbers, but you can at least look for trends and when you see An email that typically, let’s say, you know, your baseline.

Once you see an email that is higher than your baseline, you know, that’s probably a good subject line. Let me try a similar formatted one and see if it works again. And if you see one that’s lower than average, you know, that’s probably not a great subject line. I wonder how I could improve it. Senior open rates.

Comparing them to each other is going to be helpful for that, but then we’ve also got click through rates and again, not going to be super accurate. You’re not going to know your exact numbers, but you can at least have that general baseline of, okay, how many people are actually clicking through and where in the email are you clicking through some email marketing systems won’t show you that I can’t figure out how to do it in Cartra, but I know mail in a bite that I used before you could see which buttons and which links were the ones that actually got clicks.

And so. For how many, the rate, if it’s higher than normal, you know, okay, this is either something that very much interests people or maybe you did something different with your call to action and then similar to, okay, if it’s not so high, maybe I need to improve my call to action, maybe it’s something they don’t care about, but then where in the email can be really helpful for, okay, did they like the button or did they like the, yeah.

Just plain link. Did they, like, get bolded? Did it work? You know, there’s all kinds of little formatting details that you can play around with with that. Now, we’ve got our much more accurate numbers. First and foremost, email list size. Now, we don’t want to get trapped in vanity numbers. We don’t want to grow our email list just for the sake of growing our email list.

We want to make sure that those on our email list are engaged, that they’re the right fit, all of those things. But tracking your email list size is going to help you know whether or not your growth marketing strategies are working, right? So if your list is growing and they’re coming from those growth marketing strategies, great.

If it’s not growing, you know that maybe you’re spending time on growth marketing strategies that aren’t converting. So can you dive into why they’re not converting and figure that out? And then if you’ve been working on it for a while, maybe it’s just not the right strategy for you. Similarly, you want to track new signups and where those signups came from.

So when you are doing your growth marketing strategies, it’s really helpful to have separate landing pages, separate opt ins, separate links, separate all kinds of things, tags if you can. To really track how many signups came from which growth marketing strategy. So, for example, anytime I’m in a bundle or a summit or something like that, I have landing pages that I recreate that are specific to that bundle.

I just copy paste or duplicate. But then within that, it, it gets, you know, thanks for snagging the whatever bundle, you know, there’s a little bit of copy that’s really specific to where that person’s coming from, but then also my opt in form, I recreate the opt in form so that it’s very specific to that growth marketing strategy and then.

When they opt in through that form, I’m able to set up a tag so that I can see really easily exactly how many people came for which growth marketing strategy opportunity it is that I had. So that is a really important piece of that puzzle. But again, probably something for a different episode in the future.

If you want to hear more about that strategy, send me a DM, send me an email, let me know. But you want to track those things to see whether or not you’re actually getting those leads and whether or not it’s worth your time to follow through. And then you also want to track amount of unsubscribes. Now, this is one that is very accurate, but you’re also going to just simply want to compare it to itself.

I have found newer clients, not always, but typically clients that are newer in the business space, they tend to worry more about unsubscribes. And every unsubscribe feels a lot more personal. The longer you do this, The easier it gets unsubscribes are a good thing, though. Truly, really, really, truly. They are a good thing.

That’s not just a platitude. You do not want to have people on your email list that are dragging down your conversion rates. If they’re not interested, if they’re not opening your emails, they don’t need to be there because if they’re not going to, if they’re not opening them, they’re not going to buy.

Right? So unsubscribes are good, but we don’t. Want to see massive amounts of unsubscribes, or if we do, we want to kind of investigate why were we selling to people who maybe weren’t in a place for that offer? Were we talking about something divisive? You know, I don’t know, but when you see a massive amount of unsubscribes and I mean, massive comparatively, right?

There’s no number. That’s like, this is too many. I went through and cleaned out almost my entire list 1 time and man, it felt good, but when your numbers are higher than normal, right? Why something to look into, but tracking all of those numbers is going to be important. Otherwise, you’re never going to know where those ranges are.

Right? So, your action step for this episode is to go ahead and add those KPIs to your current KPI tracker. Or start a KPI tracker. If you need a KPI tracker and you don’t feel like making your own, I’ve got one in my shop. Head to amandawarfield.com slash shop and check it out and you can snag that for yourself and just add in.

I’ve already got a lot of KPIs added in there for you, but you can add in some more if you would like. Now this week’s book recommendation is The Earl Next Door by Ashton Newbold. I believe this is a Kindle Unlimited book for all my Kindle Unlimited girlies. And this is a enemies to lovers trope that I, I can’t get enough of.

Love that. And it’s a, an, a Regency novel in case you couldn’t tell by the Earl Next Door. But it is, it’s fun. It’s a quick read. I believe it’s also a series. I’ve been really into series lately, but I’ve had so many books downloaded that I’ve only been able to read the first of a lot of them. Um, so I can’t tell you how the rest of the series goes, but I really enjoyed this one and I look forward to reading the other ones.

And until next time, my friend, I hope that you’ll go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.

Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode show notes as well as all the resources you need to simplify your marketing over at amandawarfield. com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.

Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast And ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.