Math Is Your New Best Friend

Hey, how's it going? Let's talk about numbers. Math specifically, and I know you probably didn't like math in school, and if you did, people thought you were weird.

But that's okay because math is incredibly important. Not just for your everyday budget and everything, but for your business. It's critical. And I'll give you an example of what made me think of this today.

I'm going over my email. Hundreds of them over the past couple of years, and I'm looking at the open rates and the click rates in the emails. And I'm going by percentages because it's far more important than regular numbers. If you go by percentages, it's more accurate in my mind because no matter how big your list is, you'll know how effective the headline is, and how effective the body copy is, and getting people to take action.

So I'm looking at this and what I'm discovering is there's an awful lot of them where very few people open, but then they had clicks. And then there are those that lots of people open, but very few people clicked. And here's how this works.

If you're on email and fewer people open it, but you get a lot of clicks, you know that you've got to take some action on the body copy. I take that back, I got it backwards. Then you know you want to take action on the headline, because if you increase the number of people that open it, then this percentage of people that clicks stays the same. You'll have many more people reading the email and clicking on the link.

Whereas if you have a lot of people opening but nobody clicking them, then you know that your problem lies in the email you wrote. The body copy. And you're going to have to change stuff in there in order to to get a better follow through.

A lot of people think that open rates are this great big deal and they're really not except for one thing. If nobody opened your email, they can't possibly click your link and see your offer, which is a drag. But mainly what you want to look at is the profitability of the email.

Remember I was talking about number of opens versus number of clicks. If you have fewer opens but lots of clicks, you'll make more money because more people have an opportunity to buy what it is you're offering.

And that right there, the amount of money make for the email sent, is the critical number that you have to make sure you're paying attention to. That's why email open rates really don't matter that much. The click through rate is more important. And in the end, the ultimate is how much money you're making for that email.

Of course the numbers always travel through everything else you're doing. So as far as how much you're putting out for your advertising, and what your return on that advertising is going to be, that's why email is so awesome.

Because when you send them out, it's almost cost free. You do have to pay for your autoresponder service and so on. But in the end, it's a far cheaper than direct mail.

So this is one more thing I wanted to say about numbers. When you're told, "Oh well, when you're talking about return on investment, this is how you come up with that." And this is how businesses that work stay in business, because they know how much you're putting out versus how much they're taking in, and everything they do is tracked so that they can stay on top of that game.

And that's what I was thinking of today as I was looking over my email lists. Because what I'm going to do is discard. Mostly it is zero opens and zero clicks.

I might try to change the headlines on them, but for right now the most important thing is to go back over the ones that did the best. Those are the ones that I'll schedule in the future and then I'll write new ones to try to beat those, because they'll become my control. I always want to see if I can do better, right?

So make sure everything you're doing, you're tracking your numbers and keeping control of where your money's going and what's doing the best for you.

Knowing your math may be boring to some people, maybe even to you, but I guarantee you, knowing your numbers is gonna pay off for you long term.

Speaking of long term, here's something that'll pay off for as long as you're in business.

That's what I got for today, and I hope it's not snowing where you are. 

I'll talk to you tomorrow. I'm out.