The Simple Tool to Track Your Email List Building Efforts

As a blogger, small business owner, and content marketer, you understand that you only have 24 hours in a day. You have limitless ideas for ways to get more people to your website, to grow your email list, and to get the word out about your offerings.

So how can you prioritize and become more intentional about where you spend your time and resources when it comes to building your email list?

It’s pretty straightforward: you start tracking what’s working and what’s not working, and you adjust accordingly.

If you’ve been running Facebook ads, guest posting, or optimizing your blog SEO … which of these is getting you the biggest return on your time and money investment?

You won’t know unless you have some sort of tracking software installed. I recommend starting with Google Analytics, because it’s free and it’s easy to install on any website or platform.

1. Getting Your Free Account

If you have an existing Google account, then it’s just one extra click to register for Google Analytics. From there, you’ll want to set up a new profile for your website. If you have more than one domain or web property, you can set up a new profile for each.

After you’ve created this profile, you’ll be given a piece of code that you’ll use to connect your website to your Google Analytics account.

2. Setting Up Google Analytics

If you’re familiar with HTML, you can paste this Google Analytics code into your website’s template. If you’re using a WordPress framework for your site, you can install a simple plugin that allows you to connect your site to your GA account.

Once you’ve done this step, you don’t have to worry about code anymore … and your website statistics will start tracking!

3. Creating a Goal

This is the missing piece that most people don’t know about Google Analytics: you can set goals that matter for your business. In particular, you’ll want to set a goal for when someone joins your email list.

The way you do this is to track whenever someone goes to your “Thank you for joining my email list page,” which is a regular page on your website, and can be configured inside Mad Mimi.

Once you’ve created this goal, you’ll start to see how many people per day are opting into your email list.

4. Tracking Your List Building Efforts

Now, you might be wondering why this is any different than looking at your daily opt-in numbers inside Mad Mimi. The difference here is that you can see a few key pieces of information in Google Analytics.

For example, you can tell which websites people came from before they joined your list. You can see if Facebook or Twitter are your biggest drivers of traffic, and between the two, which ones convert to more subscribers.

You can also see how much time someone spends on your site before they join your email list. Oh, and you can see the conversion rate and you can compare what happens when you install a popup plugin or change your opt-in to offer a new free gift.

5. Do More Of What Works, And Leave The Rest

Now that you have all of this glorious data to look at, it’s time to make the tough decisions. That means, you’ll want to take an objective look at the different marketing and traffic-getting activities that you’re taking on.

For example, you might love spending two hours on Facebook every day … but if only a handful of subscribers are coming from Facebook, then you need to change your habits. Instead, you might have noticed that most people who are opting in are coming to one your most popular posts on your blog, which got linked from a big website.

So now it’s time to look at how you can repeat your successes, and cut your losses.

Here’s to being conscious about your list building efforts! I’d love to hear from you in the comments below about what surprised you when you started tracking your email marketing and traffic stats.

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