How To Make Sure Your Email Marketing Is Working For Your Online Business

If you’re sending emails week after week, you probably have these thoughts running through your mind:

• Do weekly newsletters really work for my list? What does that actually do for reaching my traffic or sales goals?

• I can create a sales funnel, but how do I know if it’s performing well? Is it worth it?

• Can I tie revenue results to my email marketing?

No fret!

Tracking revenue results to your email marketing is possible.

You can see how email is working for you by measuring and tracking stats that align with your marketing, sales, and traffic goals.

But first, before tracking anything and everything, you need to know why you’re tracking this data and how it ties to your bigger goals.

Simply put: a little preparation goes a long way. Here’s how to do it.

01 | Identify your email marketing goals

Clients come to me with a variety of goals. Your email marketing strategy can be modified to back up whatever your goals may be:

• Increase traffic to your site with each new email

• Consistently send traffic to your site

• Boost webinar registration and live-attendee rates

• Increase sales for affiliate or proprietary products

• Drive qualified leads to a sales page

While you’re thinking about email marketing, consider which of these larger business goals could you reach with a solid email strategy.

Related: Your top 3 email marketing questions, answered!

02 | Measure your sales, traffic and email engagement baseline

You can’t measure what you don’t track. Start by tracking where you are now — you can use a spreadsheet like this one to start, then modify it as you need to.

Consider tracking any of these data points:

• Number of subscribers*

• Average open* and click rates for your regular newsletter

• Average open* and click rates for your nurture sequence, automations, courses, etc

• Monthly/weekly traffic sent to certain sales pages or affiliate posts that come from email (you can find this data through Google Analytics)

• Current sales page conversion rate

• Opt-in conversion rates — for the variety of forms you have, whether in-line blog posts, landing pages, or embedded in your site sidebar or footer

• Number of webinar email engagement, tracked by the number registrants, attendees and event-specific sales

*Note: Not all stats are super reliable or should be set as goal markers in-and-of themselves. Total email subscribers and their open rates are both considered “vanity metrics.” While they may boast high numbers, some lists that have many subscribers do not have high engagement that actually results in more sales or traffic. As for open rates, the way they’re tracked by email service providers isn’t reliable data — so track these numbers with a grain of salt.

03 | Measure your ongoing email marketing activity to see improvements and what’s working

As you make changes — like optimizing the copy or shifting the strategy, say by adding another email or call-to-action — you need to continue tracking what you’re doing. That way, you’ll see what’s working, improving or could use a pick-me-up.

Some of what you track can be tracked regularly — perhaps quarterly, monthly or even weekly, depending on your new-subscriber rates — like…

• Current subscriber engagement with your regular emails

• Site traffic coming to your site from email

• Opt-in rates for different forms

And other stats can be measured right along with a recent change or event:

• If you update or add to a sequence or sales funnel, set a date 30 days after to review what’s changed within the email performance. Are more people clicking through to the site, now that you linked to the blog post two more times?

• During and after a webinar, you can track the total registrants and live attendees right away, then measure the sales rate on your product or service pitch once the cart closes or the bonuses disappear.

• When you run an affiliate promo, you can track click rate engagement while it’s running, compare how different segments of your list have engaged with the offer (perhaps one did better than another?), and of course measure the uptick in sales, once you get access to that information from your affiliate.

Related: Kit makes tracking easy – see why it’s my #1 email marketing platform

How it worked for Ashley

When Ashley and I started working together, I tracked the baseline of her current list engagement — the number of subscribers, the open rate and click through rate (among others).

After creating and incorporating both a welcome sequence and nurture content for new subscribers, we saw a boost in click through rates. And because we can track this as a percentage of her subscribers, we can safely hope that the same click through rate will apply to all new subscribers and future engagement as Ashley’s list continues to grow and grow —

There was a significant increase in click through rates for newsletter emails (sent 3 to 4 times a week) by 1.25% — equating to an average of 500 more readers per email visiting her website. That’s upwards of 1500 more site visits each week and no extra work on Ashley’s plate to gather that attention — and increased advertising and affiliate revenue — through her regular newsletters! 

We would not have been able to see — and celebrate! — these results if we had not tracked where she was at the start, before we created and added in valuable welcome and nurture sequences. These sequences allow Ashley to build relationships with new readers and introduce them to the content she already has available on her site that answers their biggest questions and relieve their current frustrations.

To learn more about why Ashley knew it was time to overhaul her email marketing, how we made it happen and the results we saw — read the full case study here.

If you’re an online business owner who’s serious about capturing the attention and long-term value of new subscribers — but you want a hand making it happen and also see the data behind how this impacts your business — we should talk about how email marketing can help you sell, serve and connect with readers from day one.

I love assisting my clients through this process. So if want to know what’s possible for your business, and how I can help you get there, start by booking a discovery call with me today.