Forget open rates. Heck! Forget click rates. Here’s the metric you really need to pay attention to in order to increase list growth, revenue, and engagement!
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Transcript
What’s up? Liz Wilcox here, the Fresh Princess of Email Marketing. You are listening to episode 49. Holy crap, 49 episodes already? Uh, and this is This episode is all about the only email metric I care about. Okay, let’s, let’s just hop in here. Listen, there are a lot of metrics you can track and depending on your email service provider, they give you a lot of data, right?
It can sometimes be super overwhelming, especially in those first few years when you’re just trying to see like, Hey, does my email marketing, like, are these efforts worth it? Is this making sense? Am I connecting and converting here? So we’ve got open rates, we’ve got click rates, we’ve got You’ve got unsubscribe rates, bounce rates, deliverability, you’ve even got a complaint rate.
You’ve got list growth. Yes, that’s a metric you can track and you should be looking at. Sure. We’ve got retention. Revenue, engagement, but the number one metric I care about that I feel like takes care of all of these metrics is my number of customers. How many people are on my email list that have given me a dollar a month?
or more. Now, yes, this is, this is very, very important. So especially if you’re a person that does bundles or you give away, uh, you know, your products for free sometimes and in different collaborations, et cetera, those are not customers. A customer is defined by giving you money. Okay, uh, you know, what’s that?
What’s that movie with Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr. Jerry Maguire, show me the money, right? So, um, that’s how I, I, um, do, do customers. And it’s even, I don’t, I don’t count someone who, let’s, let’s say, Uh, you know, I promote your affiliate like your product as an affiliate and they bought your product I don’t count them as my customer.
This is a person who has given lizwillcox. com money. Okay. And this doesn’t even have to be, so I have, let’s see, I have a tip jar. So if you give me a tip, I count you as a customer, right? Even if you haven’t bought any of my actual products, if you are a member and you canceled, you are still a customer because you’ve still bought something from coworking, um, You know, all that stuff, uh, my membership, my course, even stuff, actually, you know, even people that were clients of mine, if they’re still on my email list, they are in my ESPN kit marked as a customer because they have bought something.
from me. Now, why the heck do I care so much about this metric? Well, y’all, I heard it and it just stuck with me. The best customer is a repeat customer. Can I get an amen? Hallelujah. Okay. The best customer is a repeat customer. I know if I can get you to give me 9, Maybe I can get you to give me 900 later, right?
Not that I, I don’t even have a 900 product, but I do know that the best customer, again, is a what? Repeat customer. And so, I am just trying to get the maximum amount of people in as customers as possible. Because I know, I know this about customers. Customers actually create community. A lot of people think it’s the other way around.
Oh, once I have a community, I’ll start pitching them products. Eh, wrong. Is that, is that, is that too much? Um, I should have a little buzzer. Meh, wrong. Um, Customers actually create community. Why? Because number one, customers invest, right? And when you invest, you take action. That’s number two. And when you take action, you see results.
And when you see results, you share with others. For example, with my membership, most of the people nowadays. Come to the membership because they heard it from another member. They didn’t even hear Liz Wilcox talking about it. They heard, you know, their buddy or somebody in a Facebook group or in a peer mastermind or whatever talking about the membership.
That’s what customers do. Again, they invest, which we need people to invest in our business to keep our business going. They take action. We need our customers to take action. Why? Because when they take action, they start sharing it, right? Because they’re seeing results. And so that’s why the number one metric, the only metric I really care about in my email marketing is what is the percentage of customers on my list.
I know when I get that percentage up, my open rate’s going to go up because they’re customers. They’re opening emails from me. They’re invested, right? I know the click rate’s going to go up. Why? Because they’re invested. They’re taking action. I know my unsubscribe rate is going to go down. Why? Again, they’re invested, right?
They’re not going to unsubscribe. They bought something. They want more. They’re taking action. They’re seeing results, right? So I know it’s going to just increase. All those metrics for me. Now I just looked it up this morning and I have 12, 120 people on my list. And of that, uh, 6, 038 have purchased something from me.
And that’s a, that is a lifetime. So I’ll say, you know, somebody might’ve bought four years ago. This email list, uh, turns five years old in December. So in just a couple weeks at the time of this recording and so somebody might have bought years ago But there’s still a customer. They’re still on my list.
They’re still creating that community, right? So that is a forty nine point eight percent Metric right there. So nearly 50 percent of people on my list have bought something from me And I I gotta say that’s pretty awesome. I always You Shoot for 50%. I would say in 2024, I’ve been launching less. So I’ve, I have less customers normally that in the last couple of years since launching my membership that, uh, it’s usually between 50 and 60%.
So for it to be on that low end is a little, I wouldn’t say alarming cause it’s still awesome. 49. 8%. That’s incredible. Uh, you know, so I’m going to celebrate that for myself. But I am hoping to get it, you know, closer to the 52 to 55 percent after my Black Friday sale, hoping to gain, uh, you know, 500 to 1, 000 new customers in that equation, which is really exciting.
I have no idea if it’s going to happen. I’m doing everything I can to make it happen because this is the metric. That matters the most to me. It’s very important for everything else. It’s important for those email metrics like open and click rate, but it’s important for those metrics like retention, revenue, engagement, uh, list growth, the more customers I have, the more The more people are talking about me, the more my list is going to grow, which we’ve talked about is very, very, very important and perfect segue.
That’s what we’re going to be focusing on inside email marketing membership in 2025, especially for my pass holders. I’ve got four list building events throughout the year happening. You can get on the wait list for the pass at Liz Wilcox. I would love for you to join as a pass holder and get access to all that list growth goodness.
Uh, and yes, we will be talking of course about how to increase that, uh, customer number as well. All right. This has been episode 49. I’m Liz Wilcox. You are amazing and I’ll see you on the next episode of the email sound booth.