Flodesk Analytics Explained

Today's question comes from Dr. Orna Isakson. Does Flodesk have useful analytics compared to MailChimp? The short answer is yes. In this post, we're going to walk through the back end of Flodesk and show you how to look at your analytics so you can see how your emails are performing. Without further ado, let's hop in.

When we log into Flodesk, we're going to be looking at the Flodesk drop-down for your emails. I'll show you how to view your email results. I'll show you the overview of your results and talk through what everything means. And then we'll wrap up with strategies to help you improve your email marketing performance. One of the biggest concerns that people have when they switch to Flodesk is will my open rate go down. Now I have a lot of clients that transition from MailChimp to Flodesk and they move because their lists have grown and they realize they're being charged more money as your list gets bigger and bigger. So what I’ve decided to do is to actually hop on over to MailChimp and pull up one of their resources, which I think is super helpful for this comparison. And they have something called Email Marketing Benchmarks and Statistics by Industry. So every industry is different, people engage with brands and a different way depending on the type of industry represented in the emails. How you respond to a New York & Company email may be different from a Bank of America email so you really can't just Google what's a good open rate because it really is dependent on your industry. And if you're thinking about transitioning from MailChimp, I think it's important to know what MailChimp users in that industry are getting as an average unique open rate.

So if we scroll down, I would say that the industry that I represent would be either consulting or marketing and advertising. So marketing and advertising is looking at 17.38, consulting is about 20 So we'll split the difference and say 18.5. I don't know if that's the exact number I don’t have a calculator in front of me but let's just say on average, people like me who talk about marketing advice and business advice are getting about 18.5% open rate within MailChimp.

If I hop over to my Flodesk back end, an email that I sent in September has an open rate of 33%. So automatically you're seeing my open rate isn't hurting being on a new email marketing software. So if that has been something that's been keeping you on the fence, get on off the fence and hop on over to Flodesk because that is double what MailChimp users are getting in my industry. Now what I want to do is show you the drop-down first. So if you click on the three dots in the top right-hand corner on any Flodesk email, you're going to see seven options. Now they are constantly working on the back end so perhaps by the time you read this post and it looks a little bit different, but I'm sure they're not going to eliminate useful features. So number one is resend to unopens. A lot of people are not utilizing this feature and I think it's a real shame. If someone does not open your email, they get tagged within the back end of Flodesk. If you want one other chance to email them, you can click on resend unopens and you can actually try a different subject line to see if you can attract them with a different angle. It sends the exact same email but it gives you the opportunity to change the subject before it sends it out to those people who didn't open it the first time. So if you didn't know that was there that is a fairly new feature in Flodesk. I would encourage you to use that. I have seen anywhere between a five to 10% increase in my open rate by utilizing that action number two is duplicate. You can duplicate a past email. So if you want to essentially create email templates. A simple way to keep things visually consistent is just to duplicate an old email. Number three is view in browser. I use this all the time. This is a very quick way for you to test and make sure that your links are working. Instead of sending tons and tons of test emails. You can just view in browser and then click on the things that you have linked. So that's an option.

Then you have share. So if you want to share the email, you can copy a direct link to that email. So if I copy it here, and I open it in another window, you can see the content of the email. Now this could be helpful if you're trying to share your emails on Facebook or LinkedIn. You'll see that the thumbnail that is fetched is Flodesk. So you don't want to do that. If you want people to associate the email with the brand, what you want to do instead is upload your own photo. And now you can see the image and the link to that email. So unless you upload a photo to either LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook, what's going to happen is they are going to pull that previous image from Flodesk and it's going to look like a Flodesk ad. So take the couple seconds to upload your own image. Alright, let's keep going through.

You can also look at your results which we'll look at next. You can rename it, now this is very helpful. As you can see right now the default for your emails is share your news, because that's the name of the template I used. But as you can see here I took the time to rename this September 28 - Bootstrap Blast so that I can tell what was. When you begin to duplicate emails and they start looking the same, it's gonna be very hard for you to decipher your emails from each other. So take the time, click on those three dots, go down to rename, and simply rename your campaign and that will remove the name of the template and replace it with whatever you want. And then finally, you can archive it.

So now let's go ahead and look at the results. So a quick way is just for you to hover over and click results. You can also access it by going down here and clicking on results. So within your email results, you're gonna see some stuff on the left-hand side. You'll see how many people received the email, how many people opened it, how many people clicked, how many people the email actually bounced, how many people unsubscribed as a result of the email and how many people marked it as spam. So here's the deal. Do not get caught up in unsubscribed because if people don't want your content, you don't want them on your list. So praise be to God that they are doing the hard work for you by saying hey, I am not a future customer. And they're unsubscribing. So do not take it personally if people decide they no longer want your emails in their inbox. It could be that they just are jealous and they don't want to see winning. It could just be they ain’t got time to read them even though they like them so they'll come back. You never know, especially when people are getting on your email list as the result of a free resource. Alright, so on the right-hand side you're going to see a little graph you'll see the total emails that were sent out, emails that were delivered, people that open your email, and people that clicked in the email. So all that being taken into account, 618 people actually opened the email. And so that's what gave me the 33% open rate. It's 33% of the 1800 that I sent this one to. Of the 33%, 4.2% actually clicked on a link. Now here's the deal, more than likely clicking on a link is leading them closer to becoming a sale. So what you're more concerned about is your click-through rate. So this is awesome. I'm super glad that 79 people to the chance and clicked on my link. So that's great. Deliverability, 99.7%. That's fantastic. I don't have a ton of emails bouncing so at least it's landing in their inbox. Here's something also to take into account, you would think that a lot of people are reading emails on cell phones, but this says 78.6% of my recipients actually open this on a desktop computer. Now desktop doesn't mean PC, it could mean they've read it on a Mac computer. But understanding what people are using to read your emails can impact the way that you design your emails. You can do some more fancy stuff if people aren't looking on a cell phone. So that's encouraging almost 80% of my email subscribers who received this email, actually read it on a desktop computer. Then you can see again, bounced, unsubscribed, marked as spam. So that's the type of data that you're going to see when you click on your email results and every single email is going to have that.

I want to show you a new little format that I've been playing around with. We’re going to click on those dots and then we’re going to view it in browser.  So I decided that I would start to create more of a newsletter-style email, simply because I have multiple ways for people to connect with my brand. I brought back my Bootstrap Blog so at the very top because that's the thing that I need to drive traffic to the most because people aren't typically looking at that. I put a little blurb about the blog. Then we scroll down and I put an Instagram post and I actually just linked this to my Instagram, not the specific post so that all I have to do is change the image moving forward to promote what's new on Instagram. Then I promote the free goods that Creative Market sends out. What I love about that is if they choose to buy other things on Creative Market, I'm a creative Market Partner so I get affiliate income off that even if they became a customer just to download the free content. So that's an awesome passive income strategy. And then of course, we're going to put what's new on YouTube if the person cares about watching videos. And lastly, if they just want to buy something, fantastic I'll take your money. Here is my updated Bootstrappers Guide to Launching. I expanded it from 14 pages to 25 pages and you can purchase your copy for $10. So because I have structured this to be photo-heavy with tons of things to click on and engage with, this allows the email subscriber to choose their own adventure. Now some folks are going to create emails that seem like someone wrote them to them directly, like almost a mini blog post in the email. And those are great for certain industries. But for me, people come to me for resources. I am like Grand Central Station, and I've got tons of trains coming and going at all times a day and it's my job to help you get on the right train to get to the right place for your brand. So for me, it's not about having a conversation in my email, it’s about driving traffic to things that help me convert visitors into sales. 

So I hope you guys found this information useful. I know a lot of you have questions because you want to switch from MailChimp but you want to make sure that your business doesn't suffer when you transition. So as you can see, my emails are performing pretty dang well within Flodesk and utilizing things like Flodesk workflows have helped me to generate passive income by automating some emails. So automation is also included in that rate that you pay Flodesk. Flodesk is $38 a month but if you want 50% off and a 30-day free trial, just click on this link. If you have any other questions, please comment. I would love to help you to troubleshoot how to use this platform so that you can incorporate email marketing into your strategy moving forward. You can sign up for the Bootstrap Club for free by going to lashondabrown.com. Inside you’ll receive 27 African American lifestyle stock photos shot by myself along with the PDF resources. If you liked this post, be sure to subscribe because I'll teach you how to grow your biz without breaking the bank.