In November 2016 the Cubs won the World Series and what does that have to do with email and marketing automation? Well I am going to give you my thoughts on the first ever solo pass of Beyond the Opt In and today we are going to talk about the Cubs and what they have to do with email open rates.
In 2016 the Cubs won the World Series, Woohoo! As a life-long Cubs fan who’s been living in Chicago or the Chicago suburbs all my life that was pretty exciting. I have been to many many a game at Wrigley field watch many a losing Cubs team. Watched them fail against the Marlins with the whole Barkman debacle. I was there for some of those play off games it was pretty brutal. So pretty exciting the Cubs won the World Series, but looking back right now in January of 2017, just a couple short months later. I could not tell you, what the teams batting average was during the series. What the teams ERA was doing the series. I could not give you any of these stats and why not? Because it just doesn’t really matter right? They won the World Series, who cares what their batting average was, right? I mean yeah there some data, baseball stat data geeks out there that will debate every little nuance of it, but for the average person on the street for the big picture. We don’t care we just know they won. Heck I couldn’t even tell you the scores from all the games. At moments I have to think about who they were playing. It just doesn’t really matter they won the World series, they won the big game.
Well, Neil what the heck does this have to do with email Automation? Well, what was your open rate on your last email campaign? You probably know, that is probably a stat you look at. But can you tell me how many dollars per email you made? Can you tell me what email made you the most money? No you can not. But you can recite your open rates. Why?
Your open rate is like your batting average. Very similar. You know, why do the Cubs management team track the stats? Why do the fans track the stats? The fans have a problem but the management staff has a real reason to track the stats right. So that when they are winning and losing they can look back and say why we were winning and losing. Well our team batting average was under 200 no wonder we lost. Or our team ERA was 9.2. Yeah we lost that game. These give us clues so then we can do something about that. They are using those clues to say hey if our team average was under 500 we need to take more hitting practice. We maybe need to bring in somebody fresh to talk to the guys about hitting or whatever. We need to work with these individual people because their batting average is drawing down the rest of the team. You know they are using these stats to make decisions.
Same thing with your open rate. If you had a 80 percent open rate. Is that good? We had a 400 batting average that is good but did we win any games because we had a 400 batting average, Maybe not, maybe we had that 9.2 ERA. So we scored 15 runs but we gave up 20. Great we had a great batting average but we still lost. Same with your open rate. You got an 80 percent open rate. Did you sell anything? Maybe you had a 10 percent open rate but you sold a bunch of stuff. Your sales were great with those emails.
See these stats give us clues so when we get done with our campaign or as we are going back and looking at our at an evergreen thing we have set up through automation we can go back through the funnel and we can look at the steps and say. Great open rate, great open rate, open rate died. Okay, why did that happen. Great open rate nobody clicked. Why is nobody clicking? This is what the stats are designed to help you with not to be the be all end all. So if I am looking at a campaign and I look at the emails that went out and I had a great open rate but the sales are abysmal. Okay maybe I look at the next clue maybe I look at the click through rate. That’s the next stat I can look at, and see nobody clicked my click through rate was less than 1 percent. So they were opening the emails but weren’t clicking. What does that tell me? That tells me there is a disconnect somewhere in that copy. The offer was bad. I didn’t grab their attention. Whatever it is, now I can go back an dissect that and say what was it. What do I do different next time? Other things can be abysmal right out of the gate. Our open rate was only 4 percent. okay, that’s big red flag. Okay, that tells me something. Do we have a delivery problem. Is everybody ending up in spam? Are they not even getting sent out by our provider? Is our subject line bad? Did we forget to put in a subject line? Does it say insert subject line here? Yeah, do we have these clues in our preview text that people don’t even want to open the email to begin with? Why do we care, you know?
Email doesn’t cost anything right. Hey so what if this campaign only made 50 bucks and this one made 5,000. I’ll just send out another one. Well you have a cost every time you send out an email. It may not be a financial cost, but there are a lot of different costs that can be when you send out an email. So you want to make sure you’re sending out your best stuff right? Every time you send it out you don’t want to just be like, “Hey, lets see what happens!” You want to send out your best stuff. Of course there is an opportunity cost there. Of course you’re spending your time doing this, and maybe you’re paying employees to help you do this so there is an actual cost. Of course you’re paying your email service provider. But you are paying them every month anyways. But you’re also losing opportunity. You’re creating list fatigue every time you send out something. When you send something out and nobody responds to it, you’re kind of training them to not respond to things with your name on it. So you want to make sure that in each one you’re putting your best effort into it so that things work.
So we need to pay attention to these metrics. Especially the sales one. So if I can make 50 cents per email as opposed to a $1.10 email subscriber on different campaigns – which one do you think I want to send? I want to send the one where I am making $1.10 per email, not the one where I am making only $.50. So I want to look back and see which one of these campaigns made me the most per subscriber and lets take that and make it better. Lets see what we did there as opposed to the ones that didn’t make us money. The click through rate that is not the end all be all.
All right so I have done enough rambling here on my first ever solo podcast, and I think you get the point, right? We want to look at the big picture we don’t want to look at every individual metric because that is not what matters we want to look at that overall picture. Now if you’re just getting started with email automation have you got questions? Head on over to http://BeyondtheOptin.com/quiz. Where you can take a short quiz on what your doing with email currently and what you want to do with email and I will help you figure out the perfect email platform to be on to get started with email automation. until next week I am Neil Kristianson and that’s it from Beyond the Opt In.
If you want to learn more about email and marketing automation head on over to http://beyondtheoptin.com/quiz where you can take a short quiz about what you’re doing today with email, and I will help you figure out the perfect automation platform for you to get started with. That’s http://beyondtheoptin.com/quiz.
Till next week, I’m Neil Kristianson