Skype Guest Tim Grahl on Metrics
Hey tim hey hey uh I'm continuing here yeah I've been looking forward to it I love your headset you look like you're from top gun that's for that was what I was going for you so uh tim is in virginia that's right yeah and just to remind you tim is uh a a book marketer his wife sometimes says that he is a book salesman he hates that title but basically what he does is he helps best selling authors leverage their platform and sell lots of books and tim is the guy that I call when I don't know what to do and what numbers that pay attention to what I love about him is he's he's numbers conscience conscious and he is kind of a no nonsense guy who loves email marketing he's he's tested all kinds of things measured all kinds of things and email is the marketing secret to getting people to take actions that right to him that's right you know you don't even need me you've got already so I won't ask you few questions the first question I want to ask you is okay I'm a writer we've got some artist...
s and musicians some creative people in the room I'm sure we've got photographers designers artsy fartsy kind of people and I'm in that group why do we need to care about numbers why why why do we need tio be intentional about measuring things well the biggest thing is you need to know what's working and what's not working and what you should be spending your time on it's really hard a lot of times you know you're running around trying to do all of this stuff whether you're on social media or whether you're speaking or you know whatever you're doing, you're trying all of these different things and you never know what's working and what's even worse is when something finally works and all of a sudden you start selling a lot of books are selling a lot of whatever you're trying to sell and you don't really know why and so looking at numbers paying attention to numbers allows you to make good decisions allows you to see what's working and what's not working and then you can go back and try something again if you're not tracking anything, you'll try a bunch of stuff and then not know what to do next because you don't know if any of it worked and if it did what worked and so on I look at numbers just so that I can make sure I'm not wasting my time and I can help drill down to the things that are actually working so I can do more of that and less of this stuff that's a waste of my time I'm glad you mentioned because I didn't mention that and I have been of the mind set like I'm just going to like do a bunch of stuff I mean a third against the wall and see what sticks and tim pointed out something great which is this why ask him on here? So what happens when you succeed and you don't know why and this is this is the worst thing in the world it sounds like great but it's the worst thing in the world because you don't know how to replicate it cause you didn't measure anything and so you go back and try to do everything just the way you did it before and that can sometimes be expensive it could be a waste of time and maybe you miss something and you don't replicate that success because you weren't really paying attention what you're doing you're just trying a bunch of different things so I'm glad you pointed that out, tim uh yeah, go ahead well and I think what's important to remember now too is now more than ever we have the tools to actually track everything you know so in the past, you know, if you did any kind of marketing or advertising, you couldn't always you know, exactly track what was working and what wasn't and so now we have all the tools regularly available in so many different ways that you shouldn't be really doing anything without tracking it at least a little bit to see if it's working or if it's not working so can you talk about systems? Because this is something that you're passionate about about creating a system that works and again I'm thinking in terms of, you know, writers authors is creative people ago that sounds like a robot technical speak why didn't you to care about having a system for what we're tracking? Well, so jeff, let me ask you a question, do you have a place in your house that every time you get home from working, you put your keys? I try to have a place to do that you and when I when I don't have that place, I forget where they are exactly you know, I have when I walk in the front door of my house is blue table and there's, the little silver dish and any time that I'm home that's where you're going to find my keys and why do we do that? It's so the next morning we're not running around our house looking for keys because we have mohr important things to do with our life that look for keys that's a that's, a system that's all that is you do something the same way every time, so it gets predictable results that's all the system is so a lot of times we hear system and the first time I started, you know, I had a business coach that was telling me to use system I was like, you know, I'm a two man business why do I need bureaucracy and this thing I'm picturing like, you know, all these hoops so I'm going to have to jump through and really all systems are doing things in a predictable way so that we don't have to think about something over and over we don't have to remember how to do something we don't have to look far keys and so I looked for systems that I can turn into checklist so I can do it the same way every time and I can look to see if it's working and I can go back and change that system. But whenever you get nervous about systems or think that is going to hurt your creativity, it's actually the opposite is going to save you time and save you effort and free you up so you can actually do the creative stuff instead of doing the equivalent of constantly looking for your keys. I like thinking of it as putting a frame around your art eso until you have a canvas until you have certain restrictions, you're sort of paralyzed by what you can create a question that I get asked a lot how do you write how frequently do you right where you right? You know what sort of charity you sit on? I mean, just ridiculous things on the answer is I just try to do the same way every time at the same time of day s o that I don't have to think about it so that I can get through all of that mental gymnastics, of trying to go what I'm actually going to do so that I could just get toe work. And what I love about this idea of systems is we all do have systems in our life, you know, if there's any order to our lives and what you know, some people watching this, like mere going, I really need to have a dish like that to put my keys and cause I've waited a lot of time looking for my keys, but it does bring order to things so that you can waste less time on, you know, things that aren't worth your time, and you can focus more on creating in connecting with your audience and then applying whatever you're learning so you can grow your business, grow the reach of your brand, that sort of thing. So, tim, I want to drill down with you a little bit because we've been talking about how use male chimp it's a great way to get somebody set up on an email newsletter, and I know that you've used that with your authors, and you really used it to, I think, it's. Some of its fullest capacities in terms of measuring not only engagement we've talked about click through rates, open rates, kind of some rudimentary metrics. But I mean, you use email to sell books. You know how you know what? Newsletter cells, how many books on dure tracking and measuring a lot of things on and part of this is because people are paying you to track this stuff and you've got a report on results. It's not just we got this many impressions, and we think it did this kind of good. We know that we we sold this many books because of this. Can you talk a little bit more about your system and how you use email marketing? What you track. And you know what matters to you and how you go about doing that? You know what? Your clients? Yeah. You know, some of the things you were just talking about, you know, before I came on of the opens and the click rates and how how much your list is growing and whose unsubscribe ing those air all very basic things that you should be tracking. I tracked those myself. I tracked those for my clients, those air important once you start giving people wanting people to actually take action, though, and do some things. That you can start diving deeper into different things you can do, and a lot of times what you have to do is hook together two different system, so I don't know, you know, if you've talked much about, like google analytics and so male chimp allows you to turn on google analytics tracking so you can actually log into your google analytics, which is where do you see like pays views and visitors and everybody that's coming to your website, and you can start tracking all the way from an email that you sent to how many people landed on your website, and where did they go? And so now you can start seeing not just did they click on something in my email, but what did they do after they got to my website? Another thing that we do is thiss getting deep into the book side of things, but I'll bring it back around for everybody else. But one of the things we do is with amazon affiliate tracking. You can actually create a different code a cz many coaches you want to track. And so when we send an email promoting a book and we put alito, amazon will put a particular code on the end of that link so I can see exact numbers of how many books that email sold. And so if we send, say, six, e mails in a book campaign, I'll be able to tell you which email sold more books and how many books were sold with each email. Well, that's not just specific to amazon, any kind of online shopping card that worth anything? Well, you'll be able to put tracking codes and and you should be able to track all the way from email to a sale and again, that's, where you start getting rheal data that you can make decisions on. I was just talking to a client yesterday about this where he's done a bunch of launches of his products and they've gone pretty well, but he doesn't really know what is working. He has no idea what part of the system could be improved because there's not been any tracking. And so now we're just installing tracking at each point in the process so after the words we can go back and look and say, ok, well, this worked in this den it this email in the campaign didn't get anybody. But this email got a ton of people so let's figure out what's right about that one and do that again and so again I come back to you know I'm a data guy and I like that stuff but I don't you know I also don't love excel spreadsheets you know? I don't live for this stuff what I want to know is what's working and then reproduce that and so when it comes to email marketing I always look for okay wherever I'm driving them whether it's to a sales page or whether it's to amazon or whether it's to my website you know what are they doing next? What are they doing what once they're there and with other tools like google analytics and, you know, a third party shopping cart or any of those things you should be able to track all the way downstream? So can you talk a little bit about goals? I know this is getting, you know, on a deep into the metrics stuff you can set up goals for google analytics and you can tie that with male chimp we don't need to get really deep into that stuff, but could you give us some examples of on that conversion path to say a sale? What are some of the checkpoints, the conversions that you're tracking so we start with, you know, sending an email and tracking the click throughs so we were sending people to ah website or paid or something? What do you track after that? So it's, lots of different things, so let me give some examples, and I'll try toe put people on the right path, and then you can go and do the googling and actually, like, learned the tech of how to do it. But like, one thing I do is I can track there's a great tool called lead pages dot net that I actually used when we did a webinar together, and it was it was really simple where, you know, you send an email to your list on pointing people to that page, and then that was tracking how many people signed up so I could see exactly how many people landed on the page and how many of those people actually signed up for the webinar. And so now I can, and I'm doing another weapon are here pretty soon, and I'm taking that same page and I'm tweaking a couple things, and now I'm going to be able to see and hopefully see improvements, but if it doesn't improve on, though, I need to change it back to the way it wass. So that's one one thing is, you know, using something so that it just tracks was just tracks or results. So lead pages, a tool like optimize lee is really good for this or visual optimizer any of these things are really easy to set up tests like this. One thing I do also, um, is, you know, we talked about you have been talking about how to get people to sign up to your email list. Well, you can put that into google analytics as a goal. Well and again, I don't want to get too deep into exactly the tech of how to do it, but you could just put in whatever pays they land on after they sign up is a goal. And all of a sudden, you're gu analytic starts tracking where people are signing up for your email list, and you can see that. Well, my home page gets a lot of people signing up, but my blawg, you know, nobody sunning up so what's wrong. Now I know what something's wrong, and I can fix it. So you know it's, not just well, how many people a day am I getting to sign up? Or my email list you know if you have one hundred people a day coming to your website, you're getting fifty of them on your email list that's really great, but if you're only getting fifty people and you have ten thousand people they come to your web site you have a major problem and so starting to track where what people are doing once they land on your website allows you to start seeing the holes and start fixing those holes yeah that's great and what's cool about well, first of all, it's cool about google analytics is it's a free tool? A lot of these tools are free or extremely cheap and contrasting that with years ago you pay you know you outsource this to some, you know, big metro tricks firm or something, you pay them thousands of dollars to basically guess at what was working and now you no and with goals what I like about that is we talked about having your email sign up on lots of different places and lots of different pages and you can not only track how many people per day are signing up for your email lists, you can track how many are setting up for each form and find out which one is performing best for me and getting, you know, the most amount of traction that way all right, tim, your genius thanks, guys. I I love how smart tim is that this stuff? Like I said, I learned a lot from him. I learned something from him today, and you can find out more about him and out. Think group dot com he's always trying experiments he's experimenting with, you know, his own book and his own brand that he's growing he's. Just a great gotta watch he's obviously interested in selling books, but some I can't say enough good things about him. Yeah, here. Did you have a question? Since we're not really numbers people here, I'm not at least what's a reasonable amount of time to devote to this without obsessing over it to tracking yeah, um, you know, in general, I don't spend more than an hour to looking, you know, tracking, you know, just putting them in a psyche post spreadsheet, and actually, I'll be in the forums after this. If anybody has any follow up questions, I'll be in there to answer any questions, but I just keep a simple spreadsheet that I keep up today from week to week, and usually I don't look at it until I'm ready to make a decision. So if I'm like ok I want to increase the conversions on my website I went, you know, one hundred people coming to my website only five or signing up I want to get that to ten so now I can go back and look at the data and start thinking about well, exactly how am I going to get those people to sign up so I don't spend time looking you know this stuff is a cool to get to a place you know I don't look at dad and just for the fun of looking at data because that's not fun but I look at you know I look at data when I'm trying to fix a problem the data just helps me get it's a path it's not the goal and so I think of ok what am I trying to do with my website? What am I trying to do with my email? And then I look at dad and to help me answer that question and help me identify places that are broken that I could fix that's great any other questions for ten before without her we actually have way have this is ah this is even jon marie yes hide him were the voice way have questions for you way have lots of questions coming in from online. Dr spamalot would like to know how much time you see spend checking your metrics but also if you have any experience building the email lists from the lincoln platform um so so there's there's two answers to that quite there's there's how much time do I spend and how much time should I spend so, um I spend a whole lot more time looking at them then I should because you know, every time I send something and I'm like, well, how many people have opened it so I'd just like reloaded over on dh but really you shouldn't spend too much time. You should make sure they're being tracked so there's two things to think about, you have to think about where you're storing the data and then you can look at the debt well, if you're not even storing the dad, if you're not catching the data, you can't do anything. So make sure you have google analytics installed on your web site make sure you're using male champ make sure you're using these tools that jeffs is teaching you about, and then I go to the dad and when I have a problem or when I have a question, you know how many people are clicking on my e mails? Which subject line is working the best? What are people doing? Once they're getting to my website? Are they doing what I need them to do now? I can't go to the data asked the question and give the answer back so I don't really have, like a set time that anybody should spend looking on that data because that doesn't make sense you have to start with the question that you're trying to answer as far as you know, tools like leaked in or whatever, you know, I look at all of, you know, throw every tool in the bucket, whether it's social media are leaked in or twitter or, you know, speaking at a conference of doing something like this, you know, experiment with it think of different ways that you can invite people to your email list, try them, see if they work, if they work, do more of that if they don't work, do less of that and try something new. So, you know, I don't want to go too deep in this specific tactics about a specific platform because that doesn't really make sense, but just in general think about, you know, if I was in the people shoes on the other end of linked in what would give me interested what would get me wanting to be on your email list, what are you going to send me when I'm on your email list that's worth my time? That's, what you always start with is, you know, I need to make sure that, you know, my email lists so good that the stuff that I send out it's so good that people are going like jeff was talking about before I got on, you know, people going to email me if it doesn't come in um so I start with that and then I just offer that to people you know, this is this is what you can get if you sign up for my email list and you know, I can send that people are linked and I can put out on twitter I can email people wanted a time and invite him if I need to, but you start with what are they going to get? And you make sure you make the offer really compelling. Green fantastic angela a wants to know about transitioning to a different email marketing company if it's okay, they have a nice size lists and they want to know how to transfer their contacts. And are there any troubleshooting tips that you can give around that or it is possible? Yeah, it is possible it depends on the platform you're switching from in the platform you're switching to. And so what I would recommend is is getting calling and or getting on chat or something with support at whatever platform you're moving too, so if you're moving the male chimp, they have fantastic support but if it's a weber infusion softer one of these other tools get him on the phone tell them what you're doing you will not be the first person to ask and they'll tell you the best way to move over you know there's a lot to different things to think about that again or too deep for this this situation but that's there you know I don't know is much as they know because they do this every day so talkto whatever platform that you want to move to and get their advice on the best way to go about it yeah and I would add to that that they want you to switch their platform they want your business and so they're going to work to get those contacts move over depending on the platform but I've done that I think tim is has changed platforms to on dh if you call them you don't try to do it yourself especially what's a good size list they want that because they want your money frankly well tim thank you so much for joining us we really loved having you here and we really appreciate it well thanks thanks just want to remind everybody in the chat rooms that tim did say he'd pop in there for a bit I don't want to make any promises for him but he might be in there for a bit to anthony other questions that we didn't get a chance to get to cross thanks stan thanks so much for being here. Um and, uh, yeah, thank you so much for your generosity and sharing. He was not paid to be here. Is that going to be paid to be in the chat rooms? He's, just a generous guy. This is what I wanted to bring in monies that really helpful to me. He's helped lots of other people, and, uh, I couldn't have done this part without him, so thanks him. They shift.