Ep. 5: Establishing Benchmarks with Lanie Lamarre

Meg Casebolt 0:01
You’re listening to social slowdown a podcast for entrepreneurs and micro businesses looking for sustainable marketing strategies without being dependent on social media. Social media is a double edged sword. It’s a wonderful way to stay connected. But it also can feel like an addictive obligation. And it’s even more complex for businesses, your audience might be right there, but you’ve got to fight with algorithms to maybe be seen by them. So whether you want to abandon social media altogether, or you just want to take a month off, it’s possible to have a thriving business without being dependent on social media. This podcast is all about finding creative, sustainable ways to engage with your audience without needing to lip sync, send cold DMS, run ads or be available 24/7. Let’s get started.

Meg Casebolt 0:49
Hello, there friends, I am so excited to share this interview with you today I am bringing in my friend Lainey Lamar, to talk all about how we can actually track and figure out how well our marketing is working. Now I have learned so much from Lanie over the years because even though I do a lot of marketing, evaluation and analysis in my business, a lot of what I’m learning is from Lanie, she taught me everything I know about conversion goals and how to track email clicks. And so I figured that instead of me trying to teach you what she taught me, I would just bring her in. And we could have this conversation here. Because so many of us are spending a lot of time on our marketing. And we don’t always know exactly what’s working. And while it is important to consult your gut and to say, You know what feels good? And what where do I think people are coming from it is also really important to have those hard and fast numbers. And I know that sometimes that can feel a little bit overwhelming to say, Well, how do I know what to track. And so Lanie has a really great system in place about how to know how people are finding you how they’re engaging with you, and how they’re buying from you and different numbers that you can follow in those three areas, so that you don’t get overwhelmed by trying to track all the things, but instead figuring out one thing that you can evaluate, and how to know whether or not that’s working. If you find this interview helpful, you can definitely go check out Lanie’s podcast, I will include a link to it in the show notes. It is called the OMGrowth podcast. We’ll kind of gloss over a couple terms here, which we’ll be talking about in future episodes of social slowdown. But if you really want to get deep into the how tos of how to make sure that your marketing’s working and how to track and how to improve then definitely go head over and check out OMGrowth. And so without further ado, here is my conversation with Lanie Lamarre. So Laney Tell me a little bit about your business and what you do and about your especially about your podcast, honestly.

Lanie Lamarre 2:56
Well, thanks for having me. First of all, you’re supposed to start this is the this is like giving when you’re in a podcast, there’s like the Oh, thank you for coming in. And you’re like, Oh, thank you for having me. And it’s like getting a bottle of wine in real life. It’s that sort of like equivalent. I’m Laney Lamar, you can find me over on my gross.com I have the mic growth podcast which I started. I want to say a couple years ago at this point, I don’t really know because again, what is time in 2021. But we talk about your marketing and how to track your marketing, how to really get your finger on the pulse of what’s working, what isn’t testing things, because I don’t think that’s something that people talk about enough people see the feeds and the ads in the feeds to like, oh, I had a gazillion dollar lunch. Okay, but let’s break down how that happened. What your lessons learned was as a project manager coming out in me, but it’s like, Yeah, but what worked? What didn’t? What would you do better? What really is something that you would reproduce what is something that you would tweak, and that’s really all marketing is it’s being able to take what you did, and then improve on your results, even if you failed, that you’re supposed to take those results and improve on what you did not just be like, Oh, this doesn’t work starting over. And it’s the idea of building on the things that you have in place. So when you’re and I see this mistake in a lot of ways that people are marketing themselves because they’re not. My big thing that I keep talking over and over again is you have to track your campaigns. If you are putting effort forth in the way that you are marketing yourself, promoting your offers, promoting yourself, promoting your business, anything you’re promoting things that you’re posting on social media, ads, anything like that. You want to start using UTM parameters. This is a very fancy name, but really all it is is like putting a GPS tracker on everything you’re hitting publish on. And by using UTM parameters, you can then actually see the results from Hay House My Instagram performing, how many leads? Am I getting from Instagram? How many sales Am I getting from Instagram? Um, how much just overall traffic Am I getting from Instagram? I keep saying Instagram like it’s the only one out there. But rules have three consistency.

Meg Casebolt 5:17
So let me really quickly before we go on, let me define a UTM parameter is something that you stick on the end of anything that you’re publishing on the end of the link. So if you guys have ever seen a link that ends in like, question mark UTM equals campaign, that’s what we’re talking about here. It doesn’t change anything about how people are going to view the page. Often, you can turn this into a short link, so people don’t even know that it’s in there. But then you can go into your Google Analytics and see this. So you kind of said, like, you can go check this out. You do that in your Analytics, you can go into your analytics and look at your acquisition campaigns. I know we’re throwing a lot of technical terms out, but your acquisition campaign will do exactly what Laney just said, which is, where did this traffic come from? Did it turn into a sale, and that’s such a and it’s not just social media, it’s you can do this in your emails, you can do this in any referral traffic you’re bringing into your site. I mean, I track it in my emails, and it’s so powerful, because you can then know like, which of my emails did people actually buy? From which link within the email? Did they click? Did they click in the body link? The image, the footer? What is working?

Lanie Lamarre 6:29
And what’s I’m gonna throw the sort of everyone’s like chicken, little about all the updates happening right? Now, listen, it’s only going to get worse. And I say worse in quotation marks, because listen, the reason that all these laws are being put in place, all of these changes are being made to the browsers, people like the iOS updates, everyone’s like, it’s messing up all my tracking. And my conversion rates are plummeting, your conversion rates are not plummeting, they’re the same as they were. Nothing has changed. Except for the ability for browsers, for even countries to track information online, these things are only going to become more and more prevalent. And it’s going to be more and more important for you to take ownership of putting things like UTM parameters, which is very legit, by the way, it’s not creepy, privacy, non compliant the way the Facebook and the YouTube and all these people are using your information, you know, which is why it’s important for you to start taking that ownership over how your information is or how your campaigns are being tracked. Because these companies will no longer be able to even provide you this information. So it’s not that your conversion rates or tracking are are plummeting, it’s that you’re going to have to start putting in different ways of tracking them.

Meg Casebolt 7:46
And I think also taking some responsibility for gathering the information that you need. Because if you’re running Facebook ads, if you’re getting traffic from YouTube, if you’re posting things on Pinterest, or Facebook or Instagram, and you’re then just looking at the analytics that come from those tools, again, whether you’re paying for it or not, you’re going to get the information that they want to tell you. And that’s mostly going to be what happens on their platform, Facebook ads is a little different, because they do have that conversion pixel that will tell you when people actually complete a task. But even though a lot of that’s not going to come through. So by owning your website, and doing the work to track what happens on your website and how people are finding your website, you’re taking ownership over that. And you can splice that information any way you need to. So knowing that you have a million impressions on Pinterest, well, what does it mean unless it turns into subscribers or unless people are buying from you? And that’s not something Pinterest can tell you? Sure you can have people looking at your pins. But what does it mean for the money that you’re making?

Lanie Lamarre 8:52
Well, because Pinterest only cares about what you’re doing on Pinterest, it’s their business model. They don’t care about what happens to people when they leave Pinterest. Their goal is to keep people on their platform. So it’s your responsibility to track what happens when they leave one platform to come to your home. When they come into your home. You are responsible for them. They brought their bottle of wine now you have to serve them dinner like is it’s a matter of being able to provide for the people who are coming to you. But you also have to you have the responsibility of seeing where they came

Meg Casebolt 9:22
from. And how does that help you to make decisions about what marketing you want to continue to do and what you want to kind of let go of?

Lanie Lamarre 9:31
So let’s say you put UTM parameters on your emails, like you mentioned earlier, that’s a great example. Because then let’s say you have a welcome sequence in place where people who sign up to your email list they get a series of emails, one through five, let’s say and you want to understand like, which, like how are people interacting with those emails? If you put UTM parameters on the links that you’re using within those emails, your ad to identify, oh, people open email number three way more than one, two, and four and five. Oh, well, what’s so special about number three? Well, you think of, you’re going to immediately have to assume the subject line is the first thing you’re going to look at, well, what is it about the subject line that are making people much more interested in opening that email or clicking on the content within that email, then the other emails, you’re really able to compare your performance, not against what other people are doing in the online world, or what people are telling you you should be aiming for. But you’re really able to look at what the trends are in how you’re performing, and then improve on them, and then improve on those improvements, and then improve on those improvements.

Meg Casebolt 10:38
Right, and whatever tool you’re using for your email, again, they’re going to give you the information that’s important to them, which is what’s your open rate? What’s your click through rate, but that is not necessarily going to correlate to a sale, just because people are clicking Trust me, I have people who have an opening my emails for years, every single one of them and has never bought from me, and that’s okay. Like people just hang out, sometimes they’ll they’ll buy if they’re ready, whatever. But I don’t know, based on the information coming from Active Campaign, or ConvertKit, or mailer light, whether an email is profitable, right? It’s not until we put those UTM parameters into the links of your email, that you can then say, oh, when people clicked on this email, they, they actually did what I wanted them to do.

Lanie Lamarre 11:27
And even the people who are not buying from you, you still want to know what people are clicking on what is engaging people. Like right now you’re seeing you might be hearing about this. And we’re throwing all kinds of technical terms around today. So why stop now. But Google Analytics has the sort of, let’s call it old school. It’s not quite old school yet, because people are still using it. I was actually at a conference, a virtual conference, of course, because nobody’s going anywhere. But it was a virtual conference about, you know, analytics. And the nerds all agreed that we are all still using Universal Analytics. And we are implementing GA four, which is the new version, it’s not ready for its close up yet is what I keep saying, but it will be. And you still want to have both of them installed on your website so that you’re using Universal Analytics, but a collecting that data in the background. Because these are two totally different data models. They’re collecting information in a totally different way. Why? Because of all these changes that are happening to privacy laws, and to just people acting like human beings and not collecting information that is, you know, not kosher, when you know better you do better. And now we know better that we’ve really pushed it way too far with personal information being shared online. So this new GA four is going to reflect that. So back in the day, you used to have things like pageviews and sessions like remember when you had those, like GeoCities accounts, and you would get into a website? And it would tell you like 6000 people saw this page, it would be on the little countdown clicker. Oh, yeah. So that still exists. But in a different sort of format. Like now you’ll see. If you go to I don’t know, summits webpage or something, it’ll be like, a Mona Phil, from Milwaukee looked at this product two hours ago. And those social proof things that are happening in the bottom, yeah, shout outs, validating that, hey, other people think this is cool, too, you should stick around. So it’s just in a different way that they’re presenting the information. And that’s what’s happening now. So instead of pageviews, and sessions, we’re thinking about engagement metrics, are people clicking? Are people scrolling? Are people watching the video? Those sorts of metrics are now what things are going to be measured against. And I love that because it’s one thing for, I don’t really care how many people saw my page, but how many people were interested in my page? You know?

Meg Casebolt 13:47
Yeah. And so tell me more about these engagement metrics that we can get on our websites. You know, you said who is clicking? Who is spending time on the page? What are the things that we should be noticing? Obviously, if people are like buying a product? Yes, we want to know that we want them to do that. But sometimes people aren’t ready. What are the ways that we can know that marketing is working? Aside from just you bought the thing from me? Right?

Lanie Lamarre 14:10
Well, like you were saying, with the email, there’s some people who will just sit on your email list forever and ever, and really enjoy your content and really value you. And those people are probably talking to other people about how great you are. And that has its own value. And it’s not something you’ll ever be able to measure just like you can’t measure it in the real world, either. You know, people telling Oh, so and so said you were great, unless somebody tells you that so and so referred you, you don’t know that information. But if people keep clicking through on your email, keep listening, listening to your videos, or your your podcast episodes or whatever it is that they’re clicking on to get more of you. That’s an engagement metric that matters. It means that, oh, they’re picking up what you’re throwing down and they’re doing it over and over again. And you want that, regardless of whether I want to say regardless of whether they buy or not. Buying of course is important. It’s what keeps us all in business. but so are the people who support us and who think that we’re really great because that’s, that’s just how the online business world works. So clicking is like a big deal. And video, everyone. Everyone’s told you this by now, but video was the future of you only marketing social talk this and video that if you don’t do video, you’re a dinosaur. This is what people are telling you. And it’s not false, because it means people are engaging with your content. So being able to see view and view times and all that engagement with the content that you’re putting out there to see how much have you are people sort of absorbing or taking it I don’t want, who knows how much they’re absorbing, but they’re taking,

Meg Casebolt 15:44
they at least have it running in the background while they’re doing the dishes or going on a walk or something

Lanie Lamarre 15:49
in my house with podcasts or just like what are they talking about? I don’t know, zoned out 10 minutes ago.

Meg Casebolt 15:55
I was like, sometimes I’ll do like a face mask or like a hair mask. And I’ll just like have my earbuds in I’m like, no, no idea what’s actually going on. Sometimes my husband will even watch my YouTube channel, just get my watch time up. I’m like, does that you’re watching them like for speed? I don’t know. But hey, okay. But But what I don’t think I don’t think YouTube goes that fast. I think that’s boxer that goes

Lanie Lamarre 16:20
no, but you can put a Chrome extension that allow you to do that. Why do I know that? Because I have I have issues. It’s just my husband makes fun of me all the time just being like, you can’t even hear what they’re saying. Oh, no, I can

Meg Casebolt 16:35
absorb everything I know. And I like to think of metrics as like kind of three tiers. One is like awareness of like, how many people know that I exist? Yes. How many people are coming to my website from these different places? You know, are people coming from my YouTube channel? Are they going directly to my podcast show notes, which is often a sign that they are a podcast listener, we can hold other conversations on time about podcast tracking and analytics. But let’s not go down that road. Because that’s a rabbit hole. But you know, where are they coming from? And and how many people are joining might well, no, that’s not really awareness. But like, how are people finding out about me? How do new people find out that my business exists? Yeah. And then I think the second tier from that is the engagement piece, which isn’t how are new users finding me, but how many people are coming back to my website? What’s my percentage of new users versus returning users? And when people come to my website, whether they’re new or returning, how much time are they spending on the page? How many pages are they looking at? Are they going to one page and leaving? Which would be a high bounce rate? Or am I able to engage with that? You know, are they actually you know, picking up what I’m putting down for lack of a better term? And then the third tier is are they buying? Yeah. And so if you’re thinking about what are the things that I need to be tracking, it is kind of a three tier system, how many new people are finding me how many people are actually reading or listening or watching what I am producing? And then how many people are becoming my customer?

Lanie Lamarre 18:10
Yeah, I like to refer to that as like the ABCs of marketing, where it’s like awareness, building rapport, or building engagement, and see for conversion. Yeah. Because that’s, that’s it. That’s the funnel? Are we saying funnel? I guess

Meg Casebolt 18:25
we can say funnel there. If you want to think of it as a funnel that we have our top of funnel, which would be new people finding us and entering our world, the middle of funnel, is that kind of how are people interacting with my content or with what I’m producing? And then the bottom tier, that bottom of funnel would be who’s actually buying from me? So if that’s a framework you’re interested in using with a funnel, yeah, that might help explain it to

Lanie Lamarre 18:49
absolutely. And people tend to focus on that conversion element as being the primary thing and let’s be honest, you, you have to go through the two other steps before you get to the conversion part. Like this isn’t Tinder, where you can just swipe and we have a date, and we’re making Whoopee? No, it’s actually, this

Meg Casebolt 19:09
is 90 years old.

Lanie Lamarre 19:15
I have been watching old school game shows.

Meg Casebolt 19:19
I’ve been reading too many romance novels. So I would say things like throbbing body parts. Yeah, no, my mind is much more serious. So yeah, but I think you’re right that you need to think about not just how many people are buying from me, but where are they coming from and how are they engaging with me? And then you said the word conversion in here a year a lot of people talking about what is your conversion rate? How do you know what your conversion rate is?

Lanie Lamarre 19:47
Okay, here’s my nally. I’m going to go on

Meg Casebolt 19:50
open the doors do a read.

Lanie Lamarre 19:54
Here’s the thing you I don’t know if you do this on purpose or not. But at this point, you know me so totally just Like, here’s the whole, let’s poke it.

Meg Casebolt 20:03
So many of these interviews will be like, I know all the buttons, don’t let me open these doors to rants. Okay, I have a beef

Lanie Lamarre 20:11
with I have a beef with a lot of things, I’m going to go back, I’m going to go back to the future. One of the things I’m biggest beef with, and I hope with the new analytics, this changes, but we need to stop calling people users. I mean, unless you’re a drug dealer, I don’t know anybody else who refers to their clients as users. And I hate that it keeps showing up in Google Analytics, maybe I’ll try to create a custom thing anyways, it users

Meg Casebolt 20:34
recode it so that way, just as people, these are humans, they are people with bodies and brains that work independently.

Lanie Lamarre 20:42
It’s weird feelings, and like hopes and dreams that you’re leading. But this goes into the conversion rate thing. So people, same people who are okay, what the term users are people who talk who brag about conversion rates, oh, my conversion rate is 48%, your conversion rate of what your conversion rate of what you need a starting point, and you need an ending point. And you have to define what these two points are. Because to say my launch had a 15% conversion rate, okay, from what to what from your email list to purchase, from your social media to purchase to an actual segment of very warm leads, who you already know will buy everything that you’ll put out to your email, or to your purchase, like these are all three different, they’re very different conversion rates for your sale. But sales aren’t the only thing that have conversion rates, you can have conversion rates for people who sign up to your email list. So that’s the amount of people who saw what your free opt in was to your to your email list. But it could also be from social media to your email, it’s like all of these things will have different conversion rates. And you’re not expected to know all of these are the jump into B, I think this is where people get overwhelmed with knowing your numbers like why Okay, can I calculate the conversion rate for each one of these individual things? Of course, not, not at once. But as you build, as you draw your focus into, oh, I’m going to improve my SEO, for instance, well, then you can start to look at how those numbers are changing and focus on those numbers. But you do have to have that starting point, SEO and that endpoint of your email list of your webs just visiting your website just to get them to your website, or to converting to a sale. Again, that endpoint is probably going to fall within those ABCs. Are you building awareness? Are you building rapport? Or are you converting to a sale?

Meg Casebolt 22:40
And one of my biggest issues with a phrase conversion rate is that we don’t when we talk about our conversion rates, we don’t talk about what is the numerator? And what is the denominator, which is I think the point you’re saying with like the start point and the end point, I just want to say a little bit of a different way, where it’s, if you’re saying my webinar has a conversion rate of 50% is that 50% of the people who got the email about the webinar 50% of the people who registered for the webinar, or 50% of people who showed up for the webinar, or 50% of the people who clicked on the email after the webinar. And by not defining what exactly the numerator and denominator of that calculation is. You can really slice and dice these numbers in ways that can be really misleading. Yes. And I think that’s something we need to be talking about in these conversations, which is if you see someone who says my conversion rate was x be like your conversion rate? of what of what? Yeah, absolutely. And if you’re doing a comparison between different, you know, different conversion rates, make sure that you’re comparing apples to apples, because there are going to be people who say, my webinar converted at 50%. And you’re gonna go, Wow, that’s amazing. And then when you find out, it’s all warm traffic, then it’s not that amazing what Nicole did 70 bucks, right, where they’re talking

Lanie Lamarre 23:55
about the conversion rate of like their ads to just signing up to the damn thing. Well, wait a second, that’s not the conversion rate that you’re leading people to believe. So be very cautious when people aren’t actually giving you those boundaries as to what they’re talking about with the conversion rate.

Meg Casebolt 24:11
Right. And if you’re trying to do a comparison of, you know, how traffic is behaving differently based on where it’s coming from, and you’re only going to the Facebook analytics and the Pinterest analytics and the YouTube analytics to know what those numbers are, then you don’t necessarily know how they’re behaving once they get to your site. So you can say, oh, people, more people clicked from Facebook than from Instagram. Well, that’s because Instagram doesn’t want you to click it’s built so you don’t click that doesn’t mean that your behaviors are better or worse. It’s like, yes, you can look at a click through rate, you can look at a click through rate of how many people who saw me in Google actually clicked on my website. And then you can do how many people who saw me on Google and then click to my website, sign up for my email list and then you kind of start to trust track that information and tag those people and know what they do. So that you know what makes the most sense to spend time on. But unless you have that information, that’s again, coming back to our UTM parameters coming back to, you know, knowing what’s happening on your website, if you don’t have that what you want to know, from your website behavior, then none of these numbers mean anything in comparison to each other. So if you have a specific page that people are landing on, and you know that it’s just that page, and you want to know how many people who land on that landing page, actually sign up for your email list, then you can say, Okay, how many people signed up or saw the page, how many people did the thing. And that’s, that’s really what a conversion rate is, is how many people saw it divided by how many people did it divided by how many people saw it,

Lanie Lamarre 25:50
and what people get really overwhelmed with as they think of everything they have going on in their business. And then they have to start to figure out the conversion rates for that. And this is where I emphasize the importance, the necessity even of doing a quarterly review, have your CEO day, and I’m so tired of this at this point. Now that just like I’m launching a, a workbook, just like you just follow it along page after page, it’s very simple. It’s not something that you have to feel overwhelmed about. But to really sit down with yourself, maybe grab a cocktail, make it super special. Maybe if you’re like me, you get a bathrobe and a hotel room, that’s like my favorite thing.

Meg Casebolt 26:29
There’s a bathroom, but you don’t even need the hotel room, just put out a bathroom for your CEO day.

Lanie Lamarre 26:34
Whatever works for you, but then spend, you know, an afternoon every quarter. And that’s a very boss thing to do, to go through yourself your priorities, your plans, your strategies, in how are you going to not how are you only How are you going to grow? But what did you do? What did you accomplish? What can you improve on? What went really well and taking time to celebrate those things as well. So I think that’s very important, because here’s something another pet peeve but conversion rates is that people ask this all the time, it drives me bananas. But what’s a good conversion rate? This Oh, this drives me nuts. A good conversion rate is something first you have a baseline conversion rate. And then when you improve that, you’ve got a good conversion rate. And then when you improve that, you’ve got a better conversion rate. And those are your baselines. It’s not about what somebody else somebody else is performing. It’s really about besting what you lasted.

Meg Casebolt 27:28
Yeah, I completely agree, as people will ask me, What’s a good conversion rate? And I’ll say, better than the last time? Yeah, that’s all that there is. Because like you said, everything should be a test everything in your business can be an experiment. And if you have something like an evergreen funnel, and you can say, well, last month, 1% of people bought from this funnel 1% of people who joined my email list and got this automated sequence, bought the thing that I told them to buy. And this month, I’m going to change email number two, and then this month, maybe 1.1% of people buy the thing. Yeah, just increase your conversion rate by 10%. Yeah. And you can say, and then you can run a Facebook ad that says this one simple tip can really increase my conversion rate by 10%. You know, like, you can you can, like, use that ever you want to. But knowing that, you know, is 1% good. If it’s better than two, or you know if it’s better than 0%? Yes,

Lanie Lamarre 28:27
yeah. And if it’s worse, and it’s 100%, or it’s a 1% every day like that adds up?

Meg Casebolt 28:34
Yes, it’s very much like the atomic habits approach to this, which is like, who cares what everyone else is doing, improve your stuff, track what’s working, spend time on what’s working in test things and see if they get better. Yeah, spend less time creating new stuff, stop creating something new every time and test and see what’s working, and then make it better.

Lanie Lamarre 28:54
Yeah. And you’ll often see where people will like you can have something that’s a good conversion rate for one person. And it’s not a good conversion rate for another person. It all really depends on your business model on your audience on your offers. Like there’s so many factors that play into it, to say what a good conversion rate is, even within your own business, you’re going to have different good conversion rates, depending on the season. Like if you were deciding what your conversion rates was for sales as an E commerce site from in the last quarter and compare that to the rest of the year. Come on, like it we’re talking Christmas, forget about it. Same deal with school, if you have something where if you are like, Oh, learning platform for kids, obviously, your sales are going to go up in the summer and leading up to the beginning of the school year, and that you can’t compare that conversion rate to the rest of the year.

Meg Casebolt 29:45
Absolutely. Yeah. And I think also like, knowing that, that the conversion rates that you have are just different over time different over different metrics. And a lot of it depends on your sales cycle, you know, and how long it takes people to move from being completely unaware of you to being your buyer and in different industries and different price points, all of it is going to be different. It’s much easier for me to sell, you know, a $10 workbook, then a $10,000 service. But you know, it’s not always easier for me to sell that because sometimes the right person walks in, and they’re like, Oh, that $10,000 thing is what I want, here’s my credit card. So no, knowing what to expect for your different offers, and not comparing yourself to somebody in a different industry, you know, there are these kind of universal like, A, you should get a 10%, click through, click through rate on your emails, or whatever. But like, if you’re constantly sending emails and say, like fire sale, everything’s on sale all the time, then you’re it’s going to be different than somebody who’s educating more, and then occasionally sends an email that has an offer. So even within the same industry, even with the same products, every marketing platform is different. Every business has different marketing strategies that they’re using. There is no universal industry, it’s like the industry standards do not necessarily apply to you. They can be a benchmark, if you want to use them. But there is no good or bad with any of this stuff.

Lanie Lamarre 31:18
Can we talk about industry standards? Who’s Who’s establishing the standard? Give me the source. I want to maybe this is the analytic part of me. But it’s just like, No, but where’s the source? Whose standard? Are we talking about? Who’s measuring this? Because I just don’t see like, what entity would be in charge of collecting that sort of results that we can all base decisions on? So goof, right,

Meg Casebolt 31:42
if you’re, if we’re talking about what is the industry standard for click through rates from emails, are those the email service providers telling us that? Probably not? They’re the ones that have the metrics, but they don’t want to look bad by being like, guess what? Only 10% of people ever click on anything that you send them, you know, so yeah, knowing what the source is. And I think this just comes back to General critical thinking about all of this, which is testier. So you know, question, who is telling you this information? And why? Question everything.

Lanie Lamarre 32:11
I do want to draw some attention, since we’re talking about conversion rates at length, which I’m happy to do. But listen, there’s open rates, they are going to go, your open rates are going to appear that they’re dropping, with all of these changes taking place again, and I’ve got, like three podcast episodes, I think it’s 3132 and 33, where I go through like the why, why is this happening? The second one is strategies that you can put in place to start tracking on your own. And the third episode goes into strategies that you’re gonna have to ditch those strategies. And here’s the ways that you can sort of work around them with the new privacy laws and whatnot being put into place, or they’re not even new, they’re just being enforced at this point. But your open rates are going to appear like they’re dropping a lot of people like, because of the iOS 15 update, it’s going to make it seem like less people are opening your email, because that ability is not going to be tracked anymore. However, you should still be able to rely on your click throughs. Because those as you’ll notice, when you if you hover over the the link that you have in an email, you see this kind of coded to, like, whoever it is ConvertKit, or Active Campaign or mailer, it’s like an internal mailing provider link, it’s not actually the one you put in, it’s sort of a standard. So you still will be able to rely on the metrics are getting from click throughs, because they’re tracked a little differently, but your open rates, were just somebody just opens the email, you’re not going to be able to see that anymore. So when you see that drop, and you will see it drop, don’t panic. But this also puts the emphasis on how important it is for you to look at conversion rates that that focus on engagement, engagement metrics are everything. Now just think of yourself. If you can’t really delineate what an engagement metric is, like, am I actively involved with this? Or am I just like, you know, clicking a link and looking at the page and shutting it, you know, that is not engagement. But engagement is when you clicked on the video to watch it or you you scroll through the page to see more of that page view. And the new version of Google GA four will be making that whole lot easier to track because the old version of Google Analytics didn’t really give you a lot of like, you would have to create events, so that all those things would be tracked. But with this new version, that’s just automatically going to be tracked for you. It’s already built into the platform. So that should also emphasize for you the importance of paying attention to that dataset rather than pageviews or

Meg Casebolt 34:55
users. And I think even though Google tracks so many of these things for us, it doesn’t I always know what the most important piece is. So take some time go listen to the ladies, podcast episodes about this, I will absolutely include them in the show notes. But make sure that you know what you want people to do. Before you design the page, yeah, what is the thing that you want somebody to do when they get to this page. And if it’s, you know, if it’s a blog post, you’re sending people to or podcast show notes, probably you want your call to action to be please join my email list, and set up away in and I’m not exactly sure yet how to do this in GA four. But you know, set up a destination link from when people join your email list. Or you can use this fancy tool called Google Tag Manager, I’m not going to talk about that even if you don’t have a destination link, it can still tell you when that happens. And then what if they’re looking at your sales page for something, whatever you’re offering, or they’re looking at your product listings, if you’re an E commerce, then make sure that you know if they buy, but when they get to that page, know what you want them to do. So you can tell them what to do when you can figure out if they did

Lanie Lamarre 36:03
it? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And like this, when it comes to knowing your numbers and conversion rates, and yada, yada, this can be as complicated as you want it to be like it can, it can snowball into knowing the minutiae of everything. But can it can also be very, very simple. Where you just sort of focus on how are people getting onto my email list? And how is my email list buying my product, because typically, depending on how you promote in your offers and your business model, that is generally sort of the route that people will take. And those are good places to start.

Meg Casebolt 36:41
Yeah. And I think also having a time period at which you assess this. So you said earlier, like sit down quarterly, and just do a retrospective, this doesn’t have to be something that you’re looking at every day, because it will drive you completely nuts. Absolutely. At the end of a quarter before you start. Or maybe you know, before you start planning the next quarter or in conjunction with planning the next quarter, you sit down and you go, what worked? What can I do more of what felt like crap? What do I want to do less of and really think about? Not just what happened on my website, but how do I like what happened on my website, if you had a campaign that’s converting like wildfire, and you are burned out, because you spend too much time reaching out to every single person, then maybe even if it did really well, maybe you want to rethink how you’re doing that. And again, treat everything like a test.

Lanie Lamarre 37:31
And the only time you should be looking at your numbers every single day, is when you’re in lunch or Summit, something that’s very like short lived time sensitive that you like, you have to troubleshoot if things go, you want to make sure things are working during that specific time period where you are promoting hard on something. Otherwise, the numbers don’t matter. The trends matter. Focus on the trends. And that’s what a quarterly review will help you do as opposed to looking at it, you know, week after week, I think it’s a little bit overkill to be looking at your results week after week. And again, unless you have something a reason to be focusing on that time period. But if it’s not time period specific, your trends matter so much more. That’s why I like to talk in conversion rates as opposed to numbers. You can focus on Oh, I had a million dollar lunch, what percentage of that was profit, I’m not talking about revenue, I want to profit, you know, so those percentages matter so much more, because they allow you to grow so much more, they give you so much more agency to be able to grow and improve on conversion rates rather than a number.

Meg Casebolt 38:35
Because if you have 5 million people who are following you on whatever your platform of choice is, or subscribers, and they don’t open your email, so they don’t buy your products, they don’t click to what you want, then certainly there are ways to monetize that market. And you know, say, Oh, I’m gonna run sponsorships, or I’m gonna have ads on the page, like it is a business model to be an influencer. But what you’re saying is like, even if you have a giant audience, if nobody’s engaging with you, if nobody’s buying from you, then it doesn’t matter. If you have 510 15 million people, you can have five people on your email list and have a 100% conversion really five sales and make the same amount of money as the people was 5 million, they’re, you know, making five sales.

Lanie Lamarre 39:20
Yeah. And like, this is the bad news of it, you are going to have to all these people who have been like promoting pay and spray kind of approach to marketing, it’s not going to work anymore. You have to treat people like human beings. And these changes that are coming into place that are going to be more and more relevant are going to be forcing people to treat each other even online. You’re gonna have to treat each other more like human beings. So

Meg Casebolt 39:43
more people, less users. I think that’s how we can summarize this. Treat people like people, not users, not just somebody who is going to just Yeah, I know. Yeah, such a strange thing. Oh, well. How can people find you online lady?

Lanie Lamarre 39:59
You can Go to omgrowth.com You can find me on Instagram at omgrowth. And if you like short, punchy episodes where like, I don’t overwhelm you with all this stuff, but I do get on my soapbox for about 1015 minutes with sound effects and fuzzy stuff. You should subscribe to my podcast. OMGROWTH. And that’s those are, those are my places.

Meg Casebolt 40:23
Just like just go listen to my podcast because I’ll tell you all the things that you learned here but much more slowly and less overwhelming

Lanie Lamarre 40:30
to bring it all full circle to the reason why episodes are so short is because that’s how long I’m paying attention to a podcast anyway, like 1015 minutes. And that’s when you have my undivided attention, then I start wandering a little bit. So I’m like, I’m gonna keep it short. And that’s why the sound effects are there too. Because I when you give me a zing, and I’m like, oh, yeah, I should. That’s

Meg Casebolt 40:49
important. Let me let me go back and my little podcast player 15 seconds, I can hear what the words were before the thing when I was zoning.

Lanie Lamarre 40:58
I’m being the change I want to see in the world.

Meg Casebolt 41:01
And now we’ve talked for two and a half times what your limit is. Thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening to the social slowdown podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe or come on over to social slowdown.com and sign up for our email list so you never miss an episode. We’d also love if you could write a review to help other small business owners find the show you can head over to social slowdown.com/review Or grab that link in our show notes for easy access. We’ll be back soon with more tips to help you market your business without being beholden to social media. Talk to you then

Please forgive any typos or errors, as this transcript was automatically recorded by otter.ai