A peek into my email stats

Est. reading time: 5 min

A few months ago, I cleaned my email list. I took a huge U-haul and moved out all the squatters.

—Which I suggest you do if you if you haven't don it in a while. Especially if you have folks on your list who are still subscribed but not opening anything. Not only are they taking up space and skewing your analytics, you are paying for them (although a few don’t, most email providers charge based on subscriber count).

I removed people who were unsubscribed completely (if you can't message them anyway, why hang on to them?), and then I removed people that hadn't opened an email in the last quarter or about 10 or more emails.

Sure I might run the risk of removing folks that never saw my emails because they filtered into spam or the promotions folder, but that means they will never see them and they won’t get opened anyway.

If someone notices I'm missing from their inbox and they want me to be there, they can always resubscribe!

So what happened as a result? My average open rate over the last month went from 33% to 54% — a much better indicator of how many people are reading my emails week to week.

But open and click rates are not the only thing I look at when I'm deep in my analytics dashboard.

Get to know your peeps and understand their patterns.

By the way, I switched from ActiveCampaign to Beehiiv earlier this year (kind of an experiment) so the analytics are slightly different and your email provider may have different ones as well.

What’s cool about Beehiiv is you can view your subscriber quality broken down my source. For example, if you wanted to see how your subscribers obtained from ads or a certain JV campaign interact with your emails, it allows you to filter them by source to view the breakdown.

Epic.

If you notice many of the subscribers that come in from your podcast link clicks are really engaged, you can invest more effort into converting podcast listeners to email subscribers.

Alternately, if you run an ad campaign on Instagram for a free download, but you notice the engagement from that group is only 10% or they tend to unsubscribe right after they get the free thing, those ad dollars can be put elsewhere.

Knowing this kind of information is GOLD.

This is the engagement funnel from one of my JV campaigns in September. This source brought in 83 subscribers — only 6 unsubscribed after the welcome or first regular email, and the open/click rates over the last 30 days are great.

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