With my email marketing I focus on just two metrics:
- sales
- number of people sent my daily Shopify tips
The reason for the first is oblivious, I need to make sales to stay in business.
The number of people sounds like a vanity metric but I don't use that to brag. It's used to make sure I'm on the right path with my writing.
Write valuable articles, people will stay subscribed and recommend the list to others.
Stop having interesting articles, people will eventually unsubscribe.
The past couple months I've noticed the number slowly ticking down. Not much, but enough to be noticeable.
Opt-ins were still happening. Unsubscribes were at normal levels. But I couldn't understand what was going on. I thought it might have been the general down-tick in the economy and people just getting tired of it all.
Until I was helping someone else setup their mailing list and I noticed a bunch of settings missing... chiefly what should happen after someone opt-ins.
Lo and behold, I found that while I was getting opt-ins they weren't going onto my daily Shopify tips list. They have been left in a limbo land for about 8 weeks.
I fixed that bug and got people back where they were supposed to be (with apologizes of course). Now the metric is back to climbing day-by-day as it used to.
This shows the importance of picking a metric that accurately tracks what you want and taking action when you see it going the wrong way (I didn't).
If I acted sooner it would have been a smaller problem.
Repeat Customer Insights comes with dozens of metrics that you can use but my hope is that you pick one or two and focus on them. The app collects the data for all of them so you can always change which metrics you watch later on as your store evolves.
Just start with one or two based on what you're trying to optimize right now.
Eric Davis
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