Realize Your Business

Author: Geri Schneider Winters

Once you have an autoresponder set up and are sending out regular messages, you can get a lot of information about your list and their interests by looking at the reports in the autoresponder.

I will be talking about Profollow (Aweber) reports, but you should find similar reports in other autoresponders.

One obvious bit of information is how many people are subscribed to my lists. But trends are more interesting than raw numbers. What do I mean by that? The number of people on my list is important, but more important than that is to learn if my list is growing or shrinking. And I like to look at daily, weekly, and monthly reports to see if I can spot a pattern. Do more people join on a weekday or weekend? Do more people unsubscribe on a weekday or weekend? Do more people subscribe after I post a new articles in my blog?

I looked under Reports, weekly new leads, and found that one of my lists had a big surge of new subscribers the weeks of April 23 and 30, 2007. So I can check my calendar to see what I was doing then. I see that I posted a big article on a popular forum for that market on April 24. They require 10-30 page papers on this site, so it is a lot of time for me to write for them. But the big surge in subscribers to my list tells me that it is worth my time to write and post articles on this forum.

If you look at your reports of new leads, and compare the subscribe rate to your business activities, this will tell you what things are good for promoting your business in your market. Similarly, if you have a lot of unsubscribes, you can determine that something you did made your subscribers unhappy. What business activity were you doing that caused a lot of unsubscribes?

Another report I can look at is verified leads. This tells me the percentage of people who confirm their subscription on a double opt-in. On one of my lists, I see that almost 20% do not verify their email address. That is a pretty high number, but I do not have information as to why these folks are not subscribing. So I have to make some guesses.

One reason could be spam. These are not real email addresses, so the confirmation message bounced. To remove this amount of fake subscribers, I could add a challenge to the webform, so that it will not be submitted unless a real person enters the Captcha code. Some people will still enter fake email addresses, but I cannot do anything about that. Or I could just not worry about it, since the double opt-in prevents fake email addresses from being added to my lists. I do not want to put a lot of barriers for those who want to subscribe.

Or maybe it was a real email address, but the confirmation email could not be delivered for some reason. There is not anything I can do about this, so I will not be concerned about some amount of unverified leads.

Another reason could be that people do not understand the instructions. To remove that issue, I can be more explicit on my thank you page, showing screen shots of the email that will arrive, and the exact steps that the person should take. Many people have found that this increases the rate of confirmation.

Another interesting report is Ad categories subscribed. On my webforms, I include an ad code. This way I know what page a person was on when he or she subscribed to my list. This Ad categories subscribed report shows me a graph of the number of people subscribed from each ad code, which tells me which web pages are the most effective at getting people to register. I use a different webpage for each report I offer, so not only do I see which webpage a person was on, but I also see which report is the most popular. The list I am currently reviewing has over half the subscribers coming from one particular report. This tells me there is a great interest in that topic, and that this would be a great area to develop products.

I took a look at the countries where my subscribers come from. I was not surprised to find most in the USA, but I was surprised by the number of countries represented. If I want to target some of these other countries, I would pick the countries with the highest numbers to start, because that tells me there is a market for my products there. I see a lot of subscribers from Canada, the UK, India, and Australia, so working with partners in those countries would probably be very effective for me.

I can get similar reports for Cities, States, Area Codes, and DMA (Designated Market Area) codes. I do not collect addresses from my subscribers, so these statistics are based on IP addresses. If I had the actual addresses of my subscribers, I would probably find that the numbers are a little bit different. But since I am most interested in general trends, this information is good enough.

An interesting feature of all these reports is I can click on one category, such as the number of subscribers from India, and I will get a list of the actual subscribers from India. I could send a targeted email to people in that country if I wanted to do a targeted promotion there.

Here is an interesting little report: Follow Up Status – Unsubscribed. This tells me which message number the person was on when he or she unsubscribed from my list. I see that if a person is going to unsubscribe from this list that I am examining, it will probably be within 5 messages. Most people who get more than 5 messages stay on my list. Maybe I should wait until message 6 before promoting any products, because by then, this person is my loyal subscriber.

Finally, I like to look at the interest in particular messages or topics. I can look at Follow Up Percentages to see what percentage of the people who received the message opened it. For those messages with low open rates, either the message is not of interest, or my subject line did not do a good job of communicating the contents of the message. I will look at the unpopular messages and try different subjects to see if that improves the open rate. If not, then I can assume the topic is not of much interest.

If I see a message that is opened a lot, then I know that is a topic which I can write more about, or develp products in that topic area. This allows me to fine-tune the products in my market place and also tells me what keywords I should be using to promote my products. Hint: The popular subjects, those opened the most, have keywords I can use in my promotions and articles.

================================================

Now it is your turn.

Have you looked at the reports in your autoresponder?

What do those reports tell you about your list, your subscribers, and the things that interest them?

How can you use that information in your business?

================================================
You are invited to re-publish articles from this blog, in your publication or website, as long as the article is intact and you include the following Byline paragraph (with live links) after each article you use…

START BYLINE

* Article used with permission from Wyyzzk, Inc.’s Realize Your Business website at http://www.realizeyourbusiness.com This website of reports and tips contains information to help you succeed as the Owner/Manager of a small business.

END BYLINE