Email Marketing Metrics That Matter: A Small Business Guide

[00:00:00] Amanda Webb: Welcome to That Analytics Podcast Kay Peacey. Hello, I’m so happy to have you here.

Kay Peacey: I’m so excited, I get very overexcited when I get to talk about data and analytics. Total weirdo.

Amanda Webb: Well, I think you’re in good company here because I just say I’m a data, an analytics and data nerd. That’s, that’s kind of it. You know, I think that’s where we are. We’re like Marvel people, but for analytics. Totally. Totally. Okay. Now, Kay is an email automation specialist, so you obviously didn’t start your career as an email automation specialist. How did you get started in marketing? And then how did you decide that email automation was for you?

[00:01:00] Kay Peacey: It kind of came the other way around and I didn’t decide at all. It decided for me. So I originally trained as a maths teacher and I taught in secondary schools, but it turned out teenagers hate me and I’m not so great with teenagers either, not in maths classrooms anyway. And so I moved into adult education and found my sort of lifetime home, which is helping people learn how to do stuff that seems a bit scary, but is actually fantastic if you just have the right person to help you. And, I taught in all sorts of things. I remember when the early days of the internet teaching people how to code directly into HTML and how to work an Excel spreadsheet when they first arrived into the world. So I’m really old, right? So I have this lifetime of teaching behind me. And then I had kids and also I have a disability. So I was dealing with a disability and lots of surgeries. And then the sliding doors moment happened. Which involves Melissa Love, who you may know, Amanda, I know you know Melissa. Melissa happens to live just down the street from me here, and our kids were at preschool together. I did not understand what Melissa did for a living at all. I now know she designs websites, and I get that. Anyway, Melissa needed somebody to help her with her email marketing automations tech, specifically with a tool called ActiveCampaign. I had never heard of any of this stuff. My technical knowledge was at least 15 years out of date, had never looked under the hood of a modern website, didn’t know what I was doing, knew nothing about marketing strategy, but something about it just hit all the buttons for me. Melissa let me loose on her ActiveCampaign, email marketing automation, and the rest frankly is history. I took to it like a duck to water genuinely. And somehow happens to have a really special combination of teaching skills, strategic thinking, and the systems thinking that you need to be able to really leverage automation in business. And so now I do that full time and I’m literally the world’s leading ActiveCampaign expert and an email automation strategist. And I didn’t even know any of that until I was 46. Go figure.

[00:03:00] Amanda Webb: You know, I didn’t really know that analytics was my thing because I’d done so many different bits of marketing until I was like maybe 48. So I think we’re pretty similar there, right? There you go. Yeah.

Kay Peacey: Yeah, we came late but we blew them real big.

Amanda Webb: So just if anyone’s listening and they’re going, I don’t even know what they’re talking about. What is email automation? Can we just like tell people what we mean by that? All

[00:04:00] Kay Peacey: right. So email automation is that thing that happens to you all the time where you sign up on someone’s website to say you want to get on their email list and they send you some emails. And the better they are at email automation, the more apt and appropriate for you those emails will be. They’ll come at the right time with the right message with the exact thing you wanted or needed and maybe didn’t even know you wanted or needed and you buy it, right? That’s email marketing automation. Business automation as a whole thing has loads of other aspects. It’s not just about the marketing bit. It can be about sales. It can be about fulfillment. It can be about internal processes inside your business. The overarching theme is that you use the automation tech to make your life as a human so much easier because the tech does the routine boring stuff for you, freeing you up to be your glorious human self and do the marvelous thing that you do, whatever it is.

[00:05:00] Amanda Webb: Okay, and I think that sounds like something I think, yeah, everyone’s gone now why am I not using email marketing or email automation, both of them hand in hand, because I think you’ve convinced anyone, luckily I am. And I can also say that I don’t probably do as much automation as I could. But it does work. It totally works. Now, most of my sales come from email marketing and it isn’t a case of me writing an email every day, which I do. It’s a lot of the automation. It’s a lot of the stuff that I’ve got going on in the background that’s delivering that. So it is a time saver, particularly if you’re working mostly by yourself.

Kay Peacey: Absolutely. It really is a case of a small team. Even a team of one can power a very big business if you hire the tech. Instead of trying to hire people into your business, the first thing you should hire would be the tech, because the tech is so much more reliable. Sorry people, but it’s true. The tech basically does what it’s told on autopilot every hour of the day. What is not to like about that? And compared to the price of hiring humans in it, it’s so much more affordable and what that does then is it allows the human bits to just shine because you’re not dragged down by admin, by time sucks. You don’t make so many mistakes because the tech is just really good at doing some stuff that humans are actually quite bad at. And it’s actually very profoundly liberating and the smaller the business, the bigger the impact.

[00:06:00] Amanda Webb: Yeah, I think you’ve totally sold it. Everyone needs to go do this now. Right. So we’re here though to talk about measuring. We’re here to talk about measuring your email marketing efforts. And I know that people may be measuring some things and they may not be the right thing. So let’s start there. What do people normally think they should measure? And is that right or wrong?

[00:07:00] Kay Peacey: Okay. List size. That’s the big one, right? Everyone’s like grow your list, you can grow your list to 50, 000 in two days. Yes, you can grow your list, but those might be terrible, terrible people for you. They might not be a good match. Growing a list based on Quantity over quality is a really bad idea. So don’t do that. That’s like marketing myth. Number one, list size is not everything. I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase before somewhere. So measuring to, to grow your list bigger, not good. Other things that people do wrong, they get really focused on unsubscribes and try to avoid unsubscribes at all costs. Unsubscribes are your friends. Unsubscribes is someone saying, actually right now, you’re not for me. Let them go with good grace. They’re helping you by getting off your list and out of the way and not taking up your time and money trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t want to hear from you. Learn to love your unsubscribes. And then number three on my big hit list of things not to measure open rate. Now I could talk about OpenRate a lot, I’m going to keep it brief. Opens are like, kind of like a magical thinking thing. A lot of them aren’t real and they never were. Even if, even if the tech knew for sure that someone had opened your email, the tech could never ever tell you that they actually read it. So OpenRate’s They have a place in measurement, but they’re not the big hitter that they seem to be.

Amanda Webb: So I was going to say that I kind of use my open rate as a benchmark rather than a number of things. And benchmarking

[00:08:00] Kay Peacey: within your own business, looking at the trend of open rates within your business. Great. If you see your measured open rate declining over time, that’s telling you something. But don’t be comparing your open rate to to so and so’s open rate. That doesn’t help you. And don’t be comparing open rates across different email types as well. If someone’s just joined my ActiveCampaign academy and they don’t open their first login and welcome email, that’s a problem. That should be 100 percent opens. However, on my Friday email that I send out every week with, with tips about email marketing, there are going to be a significant number of people who don’t open that and that’s fine. That’s how it’s meant to be. That’s okay, right?

Amanda Webb: Yeah, and yeah that I’m always asked what’s a good And somebody will say some metric from analytics and I’m like you’ve just got a benchmark against yourself and nobody’s ever satisfied with that answer ever. But that’s the truth

Kay Peacey: right? That’s the truth. I know, I like do this internal sigh of like okay I’m gonna have to tell you the thing you don’t want to hear.

[00:09:00] Amanda Webb: Yeah, I think we, we are crippled by comparison. Okay, so that’s what we shouldn’t measure. Let’s just go quickly. List sites, although obviously you do want to grow your list, but it isn’t a case of growing it at a tremendous rate, like you say, that is of all the wrong people. And I think when we focus on a metric, like I need to build my list, you do do everything that you can to build your list and you will end up getting the wrong people in there.

Kay Peacey: Oh, I see that so many times. It’s probably the biggest mistake, I see. And what it ends up with is a, there’s a really direct relationship with the cost of email marketing and automation. In many platforms, you pay per thousand contacts or whatever. If you’ve stocked up with thousands of contacts who aren’t actually that interested in what you do, you’re actively sabotaging your business. Yeah, not all leads are created equal, not all email, not all email inboxes are of value to you.

[00:10:00] Amanda Webb: Okay. Yeah. A hundred percent. So even though I’m going, I do want to grow my list, I am doing it very slowly. In fact, I’m just kind of churning it. It grows maybe a very small amount as people unsubscribe, I get new interested people in, don’t measure your unsubscribes. And also I’m going to say. Don’t look at who unsubscribed because you’re going to like these rabbit holes of pain going why did they they don’t like me anymore and that’s not the case at all they just get a lot of email and what you send isn’t right for them.

Kay Peacey: Yeah, that’s like the first thing I turn off in ActiveCampaign accounts is turn off that notification thing that emails you every time someone unsubscribes. That’s like picking your scabs every day. You don’t want to do that. I’m sorry, that was a really gross comparison, but you know what I mean. It’s not helpful to you. Trust me, don’t do it.

Amanda Webb: Okay, and the third one I’ve forgotten because we’ve been going on about the first open rate. We talked about that already. Okay, so that’s what we shouldn’t measure. I know you have three. Three things we’re going to talk about now that are related to things that you should measure. So let’s go into number one. Tell me about that.

[00:11:00] Kay Peacey: So, measurement area number one is about making sure that you are sending consistently to engaged contacts. Okay. Now, if you need, if you want to do that, which is how email marketing works, you send emails over time, regularly to people who want to hear from you. You need to know who those contacts are and make sure that you’re actually sending to them and that they are doing stuff as a consequence of you sending emails to them. So things you can measure that are really actually valid are how many contacts am I sending my emails to? This is an interesting one because a lot of people I find have huge email lists, but then somehow they’ve made a mistake and they’re actually not emailing quite a lot of them. That is amazingly common. You get people who are paying for Facebook lead ads and they’re adding them into their system, but the emails actually aren’t actually being sent to those people because somebody’s made a mistake somewhere. So check that you’re actually sending to the people you think you’re sending to. Count how many emails you are sending in a given period. And then this is where we get to the engagement bit. What, what is the click rate? How many people are clicking? in each email that you send. That is pivotal. It is so much more important than opens. I cannot emphasize this enough. An open? Eh, whatevs. It’s an indicator. They might have read it, they might just have clicked it to mark it as read. Who the heck knows? We certainly don’t. A click? That’s different. There are some issues around bot clicks going on, but you can tell whether someone’s actually clicked a link if you have. The real ultimate one, which is site tracking. Site tracking is something that ActiveCampaign as an email platform really excels at. If someone clicks through from your email that you sent using ActiveCampaign, there’s a little spy on the inside who’s watching every page that they visit on your website. So you not only know where did they click through and that they stayed on that page long enough to get site tracking, you know the next page they went on to afterwards and the one after that. Ooh, site tracking. That’s really where the value is, because then you know not only they opened it, they clicked it, having read it, and then they went to your website, and they visited this very significant sales page. So now you know they’re a hot lead.

Amanda Webb: Now that’s exciting to me and that would almost be enough to get me to move to ActiveCampaign but the whole hassle of moving is a whole other thing. That is exciting. I do have, on the important links, so on my sales page links, I have a special bit of code that will tell me are people actually really clicking or not. But that’s a pain. I don’t have it for every link that I put in because it’s a pain to create. Right. And I did. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, you don’t want to spend hours every time you send an email with all those links. The other thing I have, and obviously I’m using UTM tracking that can tell me a little bit more in my Google Analytics about that. But again, that’s more work than what you’re talking about. I’m just going to

[00:14:00] Kay Peacey: throw in there that ActiveCampaign has that built in as well. It’s automatic. It’s, I know, I love that, count wide and every single click in every single email comes with this little package of UTM parameters to tell your Google Analytics that that click came from an ActiveCampaign email and which email it was. It’s all automatic. And that is,

Amanda Webb: that is great. And also I use ConvertKit. It also does that. I don’t think it does the site tracking. I’d love it if it did

Kay Peacey: the site tracking. I think site tracking is the thing that really separates ActiveCampaign and it’s crazy valuable. I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole because we’ll be here all day and I know we need to stay focused on the measurement things.

Amanda Webb: But I’m excited about that. So I’m going to look into that. What else is the other way that I would just for anyone that isn’t using an ActiveCampaign, you can see the same people clicking your emails immediately that you send it out. So that’s another way that you could even put that tag those people so that you know that they’re not necessary. I mean, sometimes they’re really clicking your email. I know that, but at least you kind of go these people click every email. So possibly bot traffic.

[00:15:00] Kay Peacey: You’ve got to, you’ve got to be on the watch a little bit for bot clicks. And that’s something we teach in my ActiveCampaign Academy is, you know, there’s an automation you can build that will tag people if it’s a bot click so that you can just ignore it.

Amanda Webb: Okay. That sounds amazing. Right. You’ve sold ActiveCampaign. We’ll leave now. No, we’ve got more, two more tips.

[00:16:00] Kay Peacey: Right. Tip number two. Okay, tip number two of areas of things to measure is around getting your emails actually delivered to the inbox. So it’s the extremely alluring topic of email deliverability. Please don’t switch off and run away because you need to hear this. If you don’t measure the things that relate to your email deliverability, inevitably, over time, your emails will stop getting delivered to the inbox. The inbox, you will still be merrily writing them in, in whatever your email tech is. Your email tech will be sending them off to the mailbox providers and the mailbox providers will be taking one look at them and saying, no, we’re not delivering that. So the recipient at the end would not even see your email. They will have no idea that you sent it to them. This is a disaster area when you don’t want this. So, measure the things that matter to email deliverability. I’m going to run through them really quickly. Spam report rates. You can use Google Postmaster to have a look at this and it’s free. It’s a little bit technical, but you need to do it because you need to know if the mailbox people like Google are starting to think, she looks a bit spammy. That’s called your domain reputation and it’s governed by how many people report you as spam, okay? The second thing is people who don’t go as far as reporting you as spam but maybe they unsubscribe and tell your service provider which is ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit or whoever they click that button that says report this as abuse I did not sign up for that Those are not great for you because they’re usually an early warning that you’re starting to email people who don’t want to hear from you. Who might, if you carry on emailing in that pattern, you’re going to get more spam reports. So report as abuse via the unsubscribes. That’s a good indicator of, I need to pay more attention here. Any sort of negative unsubscribe feedback you should be paying attention to. If you email daily, and I know in some businesses that’s very legit and it’s very effective, but if you are a daily sender, And you start to get a lot of people unsubscribing or a higher number of people unsubscribing and saying, I’m getting too many emails from this person. Listen to that. And it’s not always going to be on the surface in your email platform. In ActiveCampaign, you have to go looking for that information. They don’t surface it very well at this time. They’re working on improving that. But it’s your responsibility as a sender to be paying attention to the feedback that people are giving you. And if they’re telling you, I’m not loving these emails right now, you need to listen to that because if you get to the point where they’re reporting you as spam, you start to look like a skanky spammer to the mailbox providers and they won’t deliver you. Okay. And the last one in this category is looking at your contacts to see who has gone to sleep, they have disengaged, and maybe gone completely inactive. Sleepy subscribers. These guys can be a real problem because they don’t unsubscribe, they don’t spam report you, they stay in there. But it’s like giving house room to zombies in your home. And if you fill your email provider with zombie contacts, it can end up costing you a huge amount of money because you’re paying for those zombie spots, but more importantly than that, you carry on sending to them. The mailbox providers carry on delivering them, but nobody opens them. And so what does this look like from the outside? It looks like Kay is a boring sender. Nobody cares. And eventually the mailbox delivery people go, Heh, no one cares about Kay. They’re chucking her in the delete box. They’re not reading. We’re going to stop delivering. You see how all of those things, individually they look like nothing very much, but you put them together, they can paint a picture of you as a bad sender and you don’t want that. So, keep an eye on your spam rate, your domain reputation. How many people are reporting you as abuse or other negative feedback and who in your account is not engaging with your emails for a period of time?

Amanda Webb: Okay, and that was my question that was going to come up. So nobody wants zombies in their life because they eat your brains. So how do I’m glad you were thinking about zombies. Yeah. So how do we get, how often should we be looking and getting rid of those zombies?

[00:20:00] Kay Peacey: I think once a month. is the sweet spot. And I’m going to tell you, I’ll confess right now, I don’t do it once a month because I’m a bit smug because I know I’ve got really good sending practices and email is my thing. So I can get away with doing it less often than that. If you have a list that hasn’t been cleaned up in a long time and by cleaning up an email list, I mean getting rid of the people who are long term like terminally inactive zombies. You need to find them, identify them clearly, your tech will help you. I can tell you how to do it in ActiveCampaign if you’re in another email platform. Find someone who can help you identify your zombies and get them out of the account because they are hurting you way more than you realize. You don’t see this stuff on the surface. The time you see deliverability problems is when your customers start telling you, my login email is not here. What the heck? Yeah. And by that point it’s hard to get it back. You need to be proactive. Zombie repellent.

[00:21:00] Amanda Webb: So if you haven’t done it in ages, do it now. And I know I’m supposed to do it quarterly and I have the last two quarters, but I know there was a big chunk of time before that, that I wasn’t. Quarterly is good. That’s fine. I am seeing as well that it’s not a massive amount of people, you know, that I’m having to, so that’s always a relief to me. Most people are clicking emails at some stage.

Kay Peacey: I think part of the reason people don’t do this is because it comes back to that fear of the unsubscribed. We feel like unsubscribes or people who don’t engage are just like hating on us. So we don’t want to look at them and we feel really emotional about it. It’s emotional when you have to lose a big account that hasn’t been cleaned up in a long time, we’ll typically lose a third of its contacts when an actual cleanup happens. And that feels awful at the time, even though you know it’s the right thing to do and it’s going to actively save you money. Because you’re not going to be paying for zombie space. If you’ve been using paid traffic, especially to get those contacts in there, then you have to shed a third of them. It feels like a failure, but it’s the complete opposite.

[00:22:00] Amanda Webb: And if, like you said at the beginning, if we stop focusing on our list size, actually it shouldn’t hurt us at all, because that’s not our main metric that we’re looking at. And that’s what I’m talking about, Churn. I might be cleaning 20, 30 people out every now and then, but I’m getting more than 20 or 30 coming back. So it’s

Kay Peacey: Exactly. That’s so important. These things, they all go together and it’s really about having a quality email list that is engaging so that you can make money from it. Because ultimately that’s why we’re sending emails.

Amanda Webb: And goodness knows I wouldn’t be sending emails or paying for an email service unless I was making money out of it. So I think that’s the whole thing, right? Exactly,

[00:23:00] Kay Peacey: yeah. Okay, tip number three. Tip number three, handily enough, is about how to make more money from your emails. So, we want to actually get some return on investment. So we, you know, we’re sending emails to people who want to hear from us, but we need to actually make some money from that. So how do you lean into the ones that are making you more money? Something that’s often missed in email measuring is where did this contact come from originally? How did they first come into my world? And this is particularly important if you are a business who runs any sort of paid traffic stuff. If you’re running Facebook ads, Google ads, or influencer stuff, you need to know If that traffic is not just arriving into your world, that’s the bit that everyone measures. Like how many people came in from my Facebook ad, but then long term you need to be able to look at your, your people who are actually spending money and think where did these people who spent money with me come from? Because if not one of your people who spends money comes from influencer, I don’t know, whoever that is, this, this amazing influence that you paid two grand to, to bring you, and they bought you 3, 000 contacts, but none of them spend any money in the first six months. That’s a problem. So this thing, I call it acquisition route, record the first acquisition point. How did they first come into the world and get that into your email tech? Because tracking cookies. Google Analytics, we love you, but it’s not going to record conversions that happen way down the line. So this is much, it’s lifetime value and slow burn, slow burn conversions. I had someone who joined the Academy this week who came in through my free accelerated ActiveCampaign training two years ago. And has now converted. Now I know some other touch points along the way, but that first acquisition is really, really important information. So record where they first came from, then record key dates, date, custom fields are a very unsung hero of marketing tech. When did something happen? So you’re not just recording, Oh, they came to a webinar at some point. You can do that with a tag, but if you record that in a date field, now, you know, when. They, came to your conversion webinar. They signed up for this lead magnet on this date and this lead magnet on this date. And then they joined my community, my freebie community. They joined on this date and then they converted here to be a buyer. That is now a chain of information with very rich data. And you can analyze that by saying, how long is it? How long does it take someone to convert typically if they join my community? How long did it take? That is gold information. And you only get that if you populate a date field when someone does something significant. You don’t want to do it for everything. You’ll be drowning in dates. But you want to pick some significant key actions that you want people to take in your world that you think are nudging them to purchase, but you don’t really know unless you look at the numbers. Get the dates in there. Then you’re going to map lifetime value. You need to record the lifetime value. How much is their total spend? Easy if they’re spending it all in one place like WooCommerce, a little bit harder if they’re spending it in Thrivecart or in a variety of sources. You need a field, a custom field in your automation tech that records always up to date, how much total money has this person spent with you? Because then you can identify your big hitters. Where is your biggest revenue coming from and who are those people? Where are they coming from? And that’s where you can do the evaluation because now you put all that together. And you look at your spend, your revenue, and you map that back to where did my big spenders come from? What were their key touch points along the way? And which of them is the shortest distance between acquisition and becoming a big spender. Boom! They’re your gold dust.

[00:27:00] Amanda Webb: That’s also very exciting to me. I don’t know if you could see my brain ticking over because I was going, how can I do this? So one of the things I would say about ActiveCampaign compared to, like ConvertKit for me is a great tool. I love it for, and I’m, you know, I’ve got a lot of automation set up, which is always a problem when you want to switch. But it can’t do a lot of that because basically ActiveCampaign is a CRM As well as being like an email marketing tool. So it’s designed with that in mind. We’re tracking all those customer journeys. Whereas ConvertKit, maybe there are things, I know there’s a lot of automation I can do that I haven’t even touched in ConvertKit. So maybe there are certain things I can do, like the date field. I know exactly how I do that, for example. Right. There will

[00:28:00] Kay Peacey: always be things in, I always say to people, the best, the best tech is the tech that you use, the tech that you will actively use. And if you’re already in a piece of tech, the first thing to do is look at, is there stuff in here? Is there, are there toys to play with in here that I have not exploited, leveraged and used? Or, or at least explored and had a look at because when we first go into a piece of marketing automation tech like ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign or MailChimp or MailerLite or any of them, there’s a lot of overwhelm because these things are planet sized. I mean, ActiveCampaign is insane, the stuff that it can do. It’s a rocket ship. You can’t, you can’t jump in the driver’s seat and drive a rocket ship first time. You have to start on the simple things, the edges and just build up your skills gradually. For anyone listening to this, I would say before you start thinking about moving platform, look at the platform that you’re using right now and see what, what toys are in here that I am not using that could help me do some of these measurement things and get more return on investment for where I am right now. I mean, I would love it if you come to ActiveCampaign and if you do, you know, you need to come find me because I know where all the good stuff is in there, but that is not to diss any of these other platforms. They are all very strong in different ways.

Amanda Webb: Yeah. And I think probably depending on the platform, if you Google, how can I do this in ConvertKit, you’ll probably find someone, if it’s ActiveCampaign, you’ll find Kay, but you’ll probably find someone that will show you, you know, how you can do that, or at least give you some guidance on how you can do that. And with, if you are a ConvertKit user, like it was only about two or three years ago that I found out that you had these custom fields. Yeah. And it’s really easy to automate a tag into a custom field, for example, so.

[00:29:00] Kay Peacey: Yeah, I’m actually going to name drop a ConvertKit person who’s really good at this. He’s like the me of ConvertKit, which is Jason Resnick. He’s very good. There you go. Get

Amanda Webb: him on the podcast and we can have a little battle. There

Kay Peacey: you go. Oh yeah. Do you know, I’ve always wanted to do that. I’ve always wanted to rig up like a showdown of the email platforms. We’d need a referee and it would be, and I know ActiveCampaign site tracking, that would be my killer punch, right? It totally is. It’s what got me excited. Exactly. But if you can find the email platform that you are comfortable in and will use that’s the route. That’s the most important thing. I would love it if that was ActiveCampaign and like I help lots of people to move to ActiveCampaign to stay there and to really get the return on investment for it because your email marketing. and automation tech should be way, way more than earning its keep. Even, you know, even as prices are going up across the industries, I know that that feels hard, but that tech should be bringing you in far more revenue than you’re putting out in cost.

[00:30:00] Amanda Webb: Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? I think with, it’s the same with paying for ConvertKit. I’m always like, but if I stopped that, all this revenue would be gone. So I’m keeping, I’m keeping up. You know, that’s it.

Kay Peacey: Like typically, I think that the sort of overall average is 30 percent of revenue comes from email marketing, directly attributable revenue. That’s big.

Amanda Webb: Okay. Yeah, that’s huge and everyone knows they should be doing email marketing and I’m just going to go back to your second point well one of your tips are your second point because lots of people know they should be doing it and they’ve got a list and They’ve never emailed them. So

[00:31:00] Kay Peacey: I’m so glad you said this because I literally yesterday recorded a YouTube video on exactly this topic and one of the reasons I’m doing YouTube is because I need people to be able to find me when they say How do I do this in ActiveCampaign or how could I do better with? How do I actually send newsletter emails? So a lot of the barriers to email sending are not technical. This is the big fallacy. People, there are loads of people who can tell you how to work the tech support desk can tell you how to work the tech, but the barriers to actually sending email are usually much more about emotional fear of being seen fear of unsubscribes, fear of people hating on you. And just the time that you think it would take. There’s actually some really easy frameworks to get you past that. And the one I did in my YouTube video yesterday was how to write an email newsletter when you think you have nothing to say. Because that’s the excuse I hear all the time. I’ve got nothing to say, so I’m not emailing my list. I’m going to bust everyone on this. Every time someone says that to me, it’s It’s a big fat lie because actually what you mean is I’m not going to email anyone because I don’t have anything to sell them right now.

Amanda Webb: I was going to say because I don’t have the confidence because I haven’t sent many emails in the last few weeks and it’s because I’ve lost my confidence in what I’m saying and I’ll write a thing and I’ll go, Oh, this is boring.

[00:32:00] Kay Peacey: Ah, yeah, I’m boring. I have nothing to say and I don’t have anything to sell. So I’m not going to send any emails. You have to, I’m going to swear briefly, you have to call bullshit on yourself at that point because you have a ton to say. I’m going to talk to you, Amanda, about this. You have so much to say. You have a ton of content on your social media. You’re posting on social media. You look at things that you think are interesting. You talk to interesting people like me stuff happens in your everyday life that you think, Oh, that’s funny. I watched this on telly last night. That was interesting. We all consume. interesting things all the time and we all can share them very easily with people who’ve said I would like to hear from you Amanda I like you. Turn up in my inbox please. I’m usually,

Amanda Webb: I’m usually great, but I’ve just like, the last few weeks I’ve just gone. Sure. Right. And so the antidote is that. I’m going to re

[00:33:00] Kay Peacey: re re re re revigorate myself. Can I, can I, can I give you one little tip? The tip is, this is huge, you have a vault. Have a place where you stash content items, and then on the weeks where you feel like that, because we all have weeks, months, where we feel like that. If you have a vault of content items, and you go to that vault, and it’s just copying and pasting, I’m going to grab this one, this one, this one, and this one, and put them in my newsletter this week, because nobody, not one person out there is reading every word of your newsletter every day or every week when you send it. So using your content multiple times is not only making it easy for you in the times where you feel like you can’t do it, it’s making it sustainable and viable and it’s also actually helping the people who missed it the last time you said it. I bang on about email deliverability so, so much and still people who’ve been in my audience for years will say, Oh, why am I in a spam folder? Right. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Amanda Webb: Okay. That’s, that’s a great tip. And I have got it like to give myself a big kick is kind of like on my schedule now because there’s a few things.

Kay Peacey: I am so sending you the link to my YouTube video.

[00:34:00] Amanda Webb: Okay. It’s time for a quick fire questions. Are you ready? Go. Okay. Data, data or data? Oh, data. Obviously. I’m British. You’d be surprised. You’d be surprised. Really? I had an Irish person. Do British people say data? An Irish person said data. Data. I don’t know where that comes from, but there’s an absolutely amazing YouTuber. The YouTube channel is called Love Data, as far as I’m concerned, but he says, welcome to love data. And I’m kind of like, people say that. I don’t know where he’s from. That sounds like love daughter.

Kay Peacey: That’s not right.

Amanda Webb: I think it might be Australian or New Zealand. Oh yeah, Australians, Australians would say DATA. South Africa maybe, you know, they have a very similar accent. So anyway. DATA. Yes. All the way. I’m a DATA. And so sometimes I do slip into DATA and I think that’s just because you hear it said See,

Kay Peacey: I have gone with ZAPIA. ZAPIA makes you happier. I’ve managed to be away from ZAPIA. ZAPIA. No, ZAPIA. Because ZAPIA makes you happy. I think

Amanda Webb: you’d like RAPIA. You know, like, oh, no,

Kay Peacey: no, no,

[00:35:00] Amanda Webb: like a sword because it’s quick. Okay, I’m going to have to add that to my quick fire questions. Okay, cookies. Do you dunk them or do you delete them when you get a cookie banner? Yes or no?

Kay Peacey: Oh, dear God. I hate cookie banners so, so much. I really, really, really loathe them. I have been known to click away completely and just leave. Especially if they’re the ones that make you have to click four boxes before you can either say, yeah, fine, whatever, or no, go away. As soon as you do that, I’m gone. I’ve just left your website. Okay,

Amanda Webb: but we have to have them because of EU policy. I know. So, when you say yes or no, when you’ve only got that option, which I agree, don’t make me get granular. Oh, I say yes if it’s,

[00:36:00] Kay Peacey: yeah, I’m visiting the website. And also because when you, when you’re being tracked by cookies, that is essentially a way of bookmarking content that you’re interested in because It’s the Facebook ads platforms and Google are watching what you do and they’re going to serve you up content that is related to stuff you’re actually interested in. I would rather that than have random internet memes all over my ad feeds.

Amanda Webb: Okay. Yeah. Very good point. Very good point. Okay. So you’re a dunker as long as it’s not too dunker.

Kay Peacey: Yes.

Amanda Webb: And, okay. I did think we were

Kay Peacey: going to be talking about actual chocolate hobnobs then. That was confusing.

Amanda Webb: Well, we could have those too. AI, yay or nay?

Kay Peacey: Oh, good question. I’m a yay and I’m a late developing yay. And only in very specific circumstances. Do you want, me to go

Amanda Webb: into that? All right.

[00:37:00] Kay Peacey: I loathe with a passion, AI generated content. I mean, I really properly object to it as a consumer and as a marketer. So if you know those things where you, where someone puts in a prompt and says, you know, describe my product. In a way that makes it sound alluring. I hate the stuff that AI spits out. And I really hate, as a consumer, getting emails into my inbox that have been written by a robot. That really irks me. Sorry, I got quite. It’s all good. It’s not okay. It’s not okay. However, where I do really feel that AI has an amazing role is in accelerating what we can do as small teams powering big business. And this is completely of a piece with automation. AI in its Optimal role to me is an extension of what we do with automation. Effectively, it’s going to automate the process of, for example, that YouTube video that I made yesterday about how email marketing tips, what, how to write an email newsletter when you have nothing to say. That’s going to have a blog that goes with it and some social posts. Now, I used to do that completely manually and it just took me a really long time. And often my writing was not in line with the way that I talk. I don’t write as well as I talk. However, if I feed my video to Cast Magic, it’s the one that I’m using at the moment, and I give it a good prompt on the style of blogs with, you know, the structure of the blog that I want to come out of it, the length of a social post that’s going to, I don’t use it so much for the social posts right now, it’s really about the blog. It does a really good job of shaping my 15 to 20 minutes of on camera live presentation with all of its character and personality and turns of phrase. It does a fantastic job of putting that into blog format without losing how special it is. The unique Auntie Kaye weirdo way of saying things. If you ask AI to shape something that has come from you as a human. Then it shines

[00:39:00] Amanda Webb: and you know what I use it for exactly that I use it, but I don’t let it write it for me I ask it and I use chat GPT. I subscribe to the premium chat GPT I sometimes use Gemini as well because they have different voices, which is really interesting I could geek out about this for ages. But yeah, I would I bring it into Descript to transcribe for the captions anyway, then I would bring that transcription into it and I’d say structure a blog post around this and I’ll say, and it needs to be, and then I’ll ask it for keywords that I can work on. Then I’ll write it based on that and then I’ll ask it to, and I got this from one of our other podcast guests, Louise Brogan, asked it to edit it lightly. And if you do that, it doesn’t add in it’s funny words. It just kind of goes through and make some suggestions of edits you could make to make it. Easier to read, more SEO friendly. So I love that. So it’s more about, and then it doesn’t sound like it’s come from a bot. It sounds like a very clever version of me.

[00:40:00] Kay Peacey: Yeah, it’s just a much more concise version of the human hand waving, goes off and says, and goes on a tangent about chocolate hobnobs, you know, it strips all of that away and makes it into this skimmable, scannable blog post, which is how many people want to digest their information. I actually don’t like watching YouTube videos. There you go. But I love reading an AI summary of someone’s blog post video. Because that’s how I consume information best. So it allows us to extrapolate what we’re doing as humans and serve our audience better by giving them more ways to consume the content that we’re producing, which is brilliant. You know, we’re brilliant people doing our brilliant things in the world. AI just allows us to speed up and automate the process of sharing that. Yay.

Amanda Webb: Yeah. I agree. And I, we could actually, this isn’t a podcast about AI, but we could actually continue this conversation talking about the different ways we use it because I think a lot of people just think of generative AI as just writing stuff for

[00:41:00] Kay Peacey: you. And actually in terms of where AI is going to go in email marketing, specifically AI analysis of email data. Is going to be huge to be able to say to an AI, find me my emails that are not performing well. Tell me which onboarding email is the worst of these and how I might make it better.

Amanda Webb: Yeah, I love it. That’d be so useful because instead of having to wade through that yourself, it can identify for you.

Kay Peacey: Yeah. So long as it’s looking at clicks and site visits, not opens, then we’re good.

Amanda Webb: You can tell it, shall we? It’s

Kay Peacey: AI. Exactly.

Amanda Webb: Okay, this is as I say we could go on about AI for ages. This has been fascinating You have like completely alerted me to ActiveCampaign’s top feature. There the site tracking I need to think about that so now I know if somebody’s using ActiveCampaign or moving to ActiveCampaign you are the person Where do we find out about what you what do you offer these people? Where do we find out about that?

[00:42:00] Kay Peacey: Okay, so you can go to slickbusiness.co/measure And I’m sure Amanda’s going to put that in the show notes as well. And that collects together the links to all of the things I’m about to mention. We have a YouTube channel, which is focused on email strategy and automation strategy. We have a free Facebook community, which currently is aimed mostly at ActiveCampaign users, but it’s actually quite diverse. We have people in there who use all sorts of email platforms. So if you’re an ActiveCampaign user, that if you’re not an ActiveCampaign user, that doesn’t mean we can’t help you. We have a free training, which is extremely good, like so good that the actual ActiveCampaign team members, I bust them sneaking in there and doing my training. It’s called accelerated ActiveCampaign. And if you are in any way thinking about using ActiveCampaign or migrating to it, do accelerated ActiveCampaign. It’s completely free. It takes you straight to the best cookies in the jar. And you will come out of that knowing weather ActiveCampaign is right for you. All right, big strong recommend. And then in terms of my paid services, we have the ActiveCampaign Academy, which is a subscription based membership. We have two levels. We’ve got essential, which is, you know, I want the foundational stuff and I want to make progress, but I’m not obsessed with it. And advanced, which is I’m using the big fancy features or I’m, actually an ActiveCampaign service provider or a marketing professional. And I really need the high level stuff. And that is. That’s my baby. That’s my amazing thing that I love to do. We do office hours calls. We have a private community, tons of courses, resources, and tutorials.

Amanda Webb: Great. And yes, if you want to know how ActiveCampaign works, there is only one person to go to, and that’s Kay

Kay Peacey: share.

Amanda Webb: I will share the link in the show notes so that you can go and measure that. Any final thoughts?

[00:44:00] Kay Peacey: Just how nice it is actually to sit and spend some time thinking about the analytics of email. It’s actually not talked about enough, I think. It’s a bit of a lost auntie in the wilderness, and I think it does need to be talked about more. And particularly, I’m really, it always makes me happy to share with listeners like yours. that they do need to pay attention to the measures around email deliverability. Because it makes me really sad when someone finds out about poor email deliverability late in the day when it’s showing on the surface. So thank you for that opportunity.

Amanda Webb: And thank you for sharing that. I’m sure people are going to love it. So, we will be back with another episode soon. Until then, bye bye. Thanks everyone. Bye.