Statistics and Trends

I’m a numbers girl. I love data. I love good statistics (yes there are bad statistics and not just because of what they tell you). But should we pay attention to our own statistics if we are working online — short answer ABSOLUTELY.

Let’s take an example of a list of 30,000. If only 8,000 people open your first email, that’s not too bad — just on 30% open rate — quite high really. Now of those 8,000, 2,000 click through to your offer — again this is pretty impressive at around 10% (being generous to my brain for calculation purposes).

So of that 30,000 for the first email, you get a 25% complaint rate. That means that 25% have considered you spam and automatically been unsubscribed. That’s a LOT. Usually email providers will suspend your account for that number. So that’s 7,500 who DON’T want to hear from you — that’s gotta hurt.

So now we’re down to 22,500. So you send another email.

This time only 4,000 even bother to open it — your stat is starting to slide to 17% still good but a big drop from your first email. But only 800 click through. That’s 3%. Now by industry standards this is considered good but from my experience with great lists, this is kinda bad.

More complaints though — 8% this time and a whopping 435 unsubscribers on top of that. So now we are down to 20,265 on your list of 30,000. Now some people would argue that this list is clean now and should start producing good regular income for your offers — NOT SO my friends — this is where the trend watching comes in.

So you send the 3rd email. Out of 20,265 you send it to, only 1000 open it and 100 click through. Complaint rate up to 15% and another 200 unsubscribe. So your click through is now 0.9% and your list is down to 17,000 (give or take).

Now the open rate is based only on people who actually saw your email and gave a crap about you and what you’re selling. If you haven’t double opted into a mail list, that stuff generally goes straight to junk mail. Which brings us to the next fun statistic.

Let’s say that for reasons unknown, you didn’t get ANY of your subscribers to actually voluntarily opt in to receive information. And now let’s say that you have to do that. So you move your subscription list of 17,000 to another account and ask everyone to RE-SUBSCRIBE. Now because they didn’t subscribe in the first place most people won’t opt in again. People are getting very picky about their email addresses. For this exercise I will be generous.

Based on your current open rate of the last time you sent this list an email you had 1000 open your email. So they may or may not re-subscribe but let’s be generous and say 500 do. The others that didn’t even open your email may or may not bother to re-subscribe, so let’s be generous again and say 25%. So from a list of 30,000 you are left with 4750 which is still a decent number.

Let’s look at those click through rates though.

Based on your current give a shit factor from 4750 only 400 (give or take) will even open them and from those 36 people might click through.

So you have gone from a list of 30,000 to only getting 36 people to even care. With that drop in numbers comes a drop in income as only 36 people are even interested in your offer.

Forgot to mention — the actual conversion rate — which means the number of people that actually BUY. It’s 0.1% industry guide.

So, out of 36 people who click through only 3 will buy.

If you kept an eye on your statistics like I told you, you would have seen this downward trend months ago.

Instead of spending 3 hours talking about rubbish or watching rubbish Facebook live, spend a bit of time on your business and your statistics to better understand where your business is headed. It’s time well spent.

Carry on.