How To Audit Your Email Marketing

Have you ever done an email marketing audit? Want to find out what to check and what data to collect to improve your email marketing? Because (spoiler alert) what you think you should be doing is probably not what is going to move the needle the most for you!

Ready to take some notes?

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

(0:09) Want to make your sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.

(5:03) Create a baseline.

(7:08) Find out how many subscribers you're gaining and losing every month.

(8:21) Find out where your subscribers are coming from.

(10:29) Work out your cost per subscriber and how long it takes you to earn that cost back.

(14:06) Calculate how much you earn per subscriber and your EPSPM.

(17:11) Calculate the highest and the average order value per customer.

(21:25) When's the last time you emailed your list and how often do you make an offer?

(26:57) Are people engaging with your emails and what do you do with those who aren't?

(29:24) Subject line of the week.

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Create a baseline

When we used to do consulting and help people with their email marketing, the first thing we'd do would be to find out the state of play. If you don’t know how you’re currently doing, you don’t know where your biggest opportunities for improvement are. You may feel, instinctively, that you need to improve in a certain area. But after looking into the data you might find that something else needs your attention first.

For example, if you’re not converting through your email marketing, it doesn’t matter how many people you bring in at the front end. It's like you're showing them an empty shop floor where they can't buy anything.

So the first thing you want to look at is how many subscribers you have on your list. It doesn't matter what the number is, as long as you know what it is. That gives you your baseline.

Find out how many subscribers you’re gaining or losing every month

The next bit of data you need to find is how many subscribers you're bringing in every month. And then you want to compare that number with the people who unsubscribe in the same period.

We track all this in a spreadsheet that acts as our business dashboard. On the first day of every month, we capture this information for the previous month. And over time, this gives you a general sense of list growth.

However, don't just assume that your list will grow at the same pace every single month forever - not unless you've done the rest of the analysis. Of course, you want to increase the number of people who join your list and decrease your unsubscribes every month. But if you think that all your problems will be over if you bring in more subscribers every month, that's probably not the case because there are many other factors at play.

Find out where your subscribers are coming from

The next thing you want to check is where your subscribers are coming from. For example, the majority of people join our list from Instagram, our free Facebook group, our lead magnets, and our paid traffic. So work out what your channels are and figure out how many subscribers join you every month from each of those channels.

This is so important that we put together a resource and a piece of training inside our membership The League, so if you’re in there, check it out. You don’t want to rely on external data on this because it’s not accurate. It's all about knowing specifically which subscribers come from which platform because that tells you what's working and what isn't.

And once you know this, you can do more of what works and stop doing what isn't. For example, we stopped investing so much time and energy into Twitter because the number of subscribers coming into our world and turning into customers from this channel was very low. So we're focusing on what works for us instead.

Work out your cost per subscriber and how long it takes you to earn that cost back

Now that you have that data, you can start looking at the economics of it. And the first thing to find out is how much it costs you to get a new subscriber. In some cases, that cost is going to be measured in time. For example, if you’re posting content on Instagram and not sending ads to it, it's organic growth. You're spending time but not money on it.

However, if you have a social media manager or run paid ads to your content, then you need to work out your monthly spending and divide it by the number of subscribers you gain every month from that channel. That tells you what your cost per subscriber is.

Once you know how much it's costing you to acquire every subscriber, you also want to know how long it takes you, on average, to get that money back. So if it’s costing you $8 to acquire a subscriber from your lead magnet, for example, you can hopefully make some of that money back by sending some paid offers to that subscriber via your email marketing. But realistically, it'll take you some time to recover it.

Knowing exactly how long is important because ultimately list growth is only sustainable if you're able to make your money back fairly quickly through your email marketing. Despite what a lot of people might think or say, marketing is a numbers game, so we need to stop making decisions based on anything other than numbers. Because unless we calculate them wrong, numbers don't lie to us!

Calculate how much you earn per subscriber and your EPSPM

The next metric is to look at how much you earn on average per subscriber in the first 14, 30, or 60 days. You do this by looking at how many subscribers you bring in a set period of time and how much they spend with you in that same period. Knowing this tells you how much you can afford to spend to acquire a new subscriber - now you know how long it takes for a subscriber to become profitable for you.

Out of these, the most important metric is the one that relates to the first 14-30 days because that’s when you’re looking at breaking even or making a small profit. If you don’t know these numbers, and you’re running ads, for example, it means you’re doing it blindly, and you're just waiting to lose money!

Also, the reason why we want to know how much a subscriber is worth to us in the first 60 days is that generally speaking, during that time we put them through automated campaigns in our email engine to maximise the value per subscriber and to get our money back.

After that period of time, subscribers come out of our email engine and start receiving our daily emails, so we look at a different metric. That's the EPSPM or Earnings Per Subscriber Per Month. And this is important because it tells us where we have opportunities to make more out of our list.

Calculate the highest and the average order value per customer

The next metric you want to calculate is to do with your customers - that's subscribers who have made a purchase with you. You want to look at two numbers:

• The highest possible order value.
• And the average order value.

The highest order value looks at the maximum someone can spend with you. If you only sell a book for $7 and nothing else, for example, that's all your customers can buy. There's no upsell, which means you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. But if you have additional offers, people can potentially spend more with you.

And if your highest order value is $1,000, for example, you then want to look at how much people spend on average with you. So if you make 100 sales in one month, for example, how much was the average spend? And how does that compare with the highest order value? This is important because it helps you make an informed decision on how much you can spend on your advertising budget, for example, without putting yourself at risk.

Have you proven your offer?

Another thing you want to look at is whether you've proven your offer. We're not talking about the product here - it's the way it's packaged, positioned, priced, and set up. It's about the sales mechanism, which includes the sales page, sales videos, your webinars, the email sequence that goes with it, etc. Have you proven that those things work so that if you run traffic to that offer or run an email campaign around it, you know it's going to perform?

Of course, that...