Stop Chasing Vanity Metrics: The 4 Habits That Actually Grow Your Business with Zoë Dew

Colie: So I think most of you know I’m in my third iteration of like my life career. First I was a college professor and then I was a photographer, and now I’m a system strategist. But I’m gonna be talking to someone today that if I happen to change my path again, I’m just gonna steal what she does. Zoe, welcome to the podcast.

Zoe: Thank you. What an introduction. You can have it.

Colie: I I know well, and here, this is when we should actually tell you what Zoe does. So Zoe, actually, I’m gonna let you say it because I think that you say it much better with your words than I will. ’cause I think I would probably put like my own spin on how I would do it. But I am absolutely obsessed with Zoe and everything that she does.

So Zoe, tell the listening audience who you are and basically what you teach people how to do.

Zoe: So I’m Zoe De that’s a very easy Z-O-E-D-E-W six letters. That’s all you need. I am a metrics and data specialist, so I help businesses to grow their business, in the way that they want to grow their business using the data. And metrics that are already in their business rather than looking at what everyone else is doing.

Because I think a lot of us are, can get obsessed with conversion rates and what the industry standards are, but actually they mean nothing if you aren’t looking at the things that affect growth in your own area of expertise.

Colie: Now I see you guys see where we’re going, right? I mean, she said the magic words, metrics, and data. Now, I will admit though, Zoe takes a slightly different approach than most people do, which is why I’m super excited to be chatting with her today. So I like to tell you guys how the people that I interview end up on this podcast, and I have been following Zoe for a hot minute.

I was on threads one day and she posted, Hey, I wanna talk about how people shouldn’t be running their business on gossip. Who’s got a podcast? I can come on. I literally think it took me three minutes to send her a calendar link and was like, uh, you can book here. Thank you.

Zoe: It literally was like that as well.

Colie: It was so Zoe. Let’s get into data and metrics because I think the over overwhelming majority of people, when you say that, they think, oh, website stats. Oh, how many people landed on my website? Oh, how many emails? What’s my open rate? What’s my click rate? And you take a completely different approach by examining our behavior first.

So I wanna get into this to like start the conversation and then I can think of a million different places that we’re gonna go after.

Zoe: Fab. Yeah. Okay. So what I found was when I started talking about this, and like I should explain, my background is in operations and systems. So I was working on a lot of launches for like. Multi six, seven figure launches big numbers. And knowing that where you spend your time and where you spend your money hopefully will grow.

And being able to understand that. So that’s where this whole approach came from. And what I was finding was when I was speaking to people. And I was analyzing, analyzing their launches or analyzing kind of their course that they wanted to grow or their membership that they wanted to grow. They actually weren’t looking at any numbers, so they might have an idea of what their open rate was.

They might have an idea of what their conversion rates were, but there was nowhere that they were tracking that, but. Also alongside that, there was no way that they were tracking their activity. So they weren’t tracking, oh, well when I send an email at seven o’clock, it means that I get more sales within the next 24 hours and when I do this at this time, or, you know, they weren’t equating the fact that they’d gone like on blackout on Instagram for 24 hours immediately after they’d done a webinar that that potentially wasn’t affecting their launch.

So I know, and it sounds so like, it sounds so. You’d be listening and going, that can’t be true. Like people, people don’t do that. Surely, you know, they must be obsessed. But no, a lot of the people I work with, yeah, like they’re creative. They are the ideas people they ideate and push through to the launch and love the visibility, but they don’t actually look at what anything they’re doing and they’re, what they’re doing is doing what someone taught ’em to do five years ago.

Based on their own success, that person who taught them. So I started to go down the route of, okay, well here’s, here’s a template and you can fill it in and look at your website every day and look at your. It’s bloody boring. Like people don’t wanna do that because you can’t see the effect that that’s having in your business.

Um, and it’s hard to automate it. And, you know, I automate everything, but it’s hard to automate that. So I started to approach it from a point of view of, okay, well let’s look at the four behaviors that you need to do in your business every single day to make sure money is still coming in. And there is four areas that you need to look at.

So there’s reach, who, who are you reaching that’s new to you? How are you bringing them into your world? Um. Re-engagement. So people who are, um, already warm, are they buying from you? What are you doing to, to make them an offer, um, return. So the people who are already clients, what is the return that they’re getting from you and what return are you getting from them?

And then retain. So people who are already in your world, how are you bringing them back in again and. The four questions to ask is, have I been visible today? Have I made an offer today? Have I delivered value to my clients today? And have I connected with someone who’s already in my world today? And if you track those four things alongside your, your sales and your inquiries.

So did you get any money in your account today? Did you have any inquiries today? Very quickly you can start to see. Which of those four levers a you are not doing enough of Usually it’s that you’re not connecting with people in your network enough, and which of them you are relying too heavily on. And normally that’s bringing new in, new people.

And those two middle ones of delivering value to your existing clients and are making an offer to people who are already in your world. Those two things are the things where most people sleep on, but give you the biggest return of investment. So tracking that behavior. So tracking all of the numbers, your website views, your click through rates, all of that is great, but none of it matters if you aren’t doing the behaviors that lead to sales in the first place.

Colie: I mean, Zoe. So I’m absolutely fascinated with these four questions because I do feel like all of us really concentrate on what the gurus tell us, which is to bring in new people.

And I think everybody understands that, you know, hey, go post seven times on Instagram and you get new people. But what we see a lot is that people are not actually nurturing these new people into becoming buyers. It’s like, Hey, you know, you came into my world, I gave you a seven email sequence. You didn’t buy my initial thing, and then I don’t fucking offer you anything else for sale for another three to four months when I’m in an official launch.

And so I love that you focus on the middle too, which is trying to sell to your existing audience and giving your existing audience, good nurturing information along the way.

Zoe: Yeah. And like, it’s not rocket science, you know, it’s, it’s the whole circle of the customer journey. But I think a lot of us, you know, if we studied marketing ever, which I did not, not everyone did, but I did. A lot of us forget about the advocacy part of the customer journey, and ultimately all of us would love to run a business that was run on referrals.

We didn’t have to market at all. But that only comes from advocacy. So when you, um, I mention this all the time. I don’t mention it enough in my marketing, but I mention it to clients all the time. Um, go and look at the Google Zero Moment of Truth. It’s a very old theory, from Google about how many times it takes for someone to make a purchase.

But the zero moment of truth is when they sit and search for what it is that you do. Obviously ties to Google now, the whole 7 11 4, 7 11 theory of how many times people need to see you is a very outdated concept. And the, the current, the last time I did a search for it, the, the current thinking is like 250 touchpoint.

So, but like micro touchpoints and I see lots of different numbers bandied around. have done the research ’cause I’m autistic af and I don’t wanna quote something that isn’t true. So, 250 micro touchpoints at least. And like a micro touchpoint is someone seeing your face on a story. It’s someone seeing your name flash up in their inbox.

It’s not like it used to be where the example that was always given to me was like, oh, a touchpoint is someone driving past your billboard on the highway. Like that’s a touch point. Like that doesn’t really exist in our world. But the micro touch point is like them being reminded that you exist. And another stat that I love to throw out, which, like for my, for my business, this is not true for everyone, and this is why it’s so important to look at your own shit is that I know it takes about 50 emails.

I’m an email first marketer. Like that is my my platform of choice. It takes about 50 emails from me for someone to make a purchase. I only know that ’cause I track it. So what do I do? I email nearly every day because I know. It takes about 50. And if I was only emailing once a week, or to my horror as someone told me the other day, they only email once a month.

Um, if I did that, you know, but let’s take once a week. ’cause it’s easy maths, it would take a year for someone to buy from me. So like why would I stretch out that process? Like speed it up and generally it works like, yeah. Okay.

Colie: Okay, so I’m actually fascinated with this. I love that you specifically mentioned emails because one of the things, and I consider myself to be a pretty avid email marketer, but one thing that I stopped doing was every time I had a new podcast episode, I was sending out a podcast email like, Hey, there’s a new episode.

And what I was finding was that my open rates on those emails were lower, and that barely anybody was clicking. So I was like, why am I wasting my email time to send out like a dedicated email, I should sandwich it into a different email that’s already giving value. And then my business bestie was like, okay, Colie.

But to realize that when I see that email in my inbox, I’m not opening it because why? I’m going to the podcast player to make sure that the new episode has downloaded so that I could read it. And I was like. Sabrina, she’s like, yeah, why would I click on it? It’s gonna be in my player. I’m gonna go click on it in my player.

And that was when I really started to think about the emails that you send. It isn’t just about the open rates or the click rates, because just seeing your name in their inbox is one of those micro touchpoints that you’re talking about. And recently I’ve been in like what I would call a mini launch. I mean, it’s really, I’m doing the sales parade with seals lockley, but you’re supposed to talk about your offer four times a day, right?

Something very interesting that I noticed because I’ve been sending all of these emails all related to this one offer, is that people were opening one email, like the newest one, and then they were going back and looking at the last four or five every time they opened an email. And I was like, oh. So if they didn’t open the email initially, but now one down the line catches their eye, they’re actually going back and I’m assuming they’re just searching Colie James in their inbox and then they’re just opening all of the previous emails one by one to make sure that they got all of that information.

Now, Zoe, I’m gonna ask you a very specific question though, because I have no idea how many emails it takes somebody to buy from me. How are you tracking that? Like what is your logic in how you decide how many emails somebody has to receive? Is it just that once they buy and you have a purchase date, you’re just like, how many emails have they received?

Zoe: yeah. Like literally, I, I track from, um, the date they enter my list to the day they buy. And so it’s not really, I wasn’t tracking how many emails they’d had. I was tracking how many days that it took them to become a customer. And so I knew that it was 50 days. And I was emailing every day. So that’s, that is like a caveat.

So I knew that it was about 50 emails, um, because it took about 50 days.

Colie: And let me guess, are you tracking this in Airtable? Because I do that with an Airtable

Zoe: Oh, yes.

Colie: They come into Airtable on the date that they join the email list, and then the date that their first purchase comes into that same sales and client hub. And Airtable, I have a formula that’s like, how many days did it take them to become a customer?

Okay, I could tell you that, but now I would just have to guesstimate how many emails I sent them in that time period. But you know what? Challenge accepted because that is a number that I would like to know for myself.

Zoe: Yeah, it’s just an easy, it’s just an easy way of for me, as like what, um, data and marketing specialist to data and metric specialist to be able to like drop into people to go, do you know how many, like why are you emailing, why? And this was where I came from. Why am I emailing every day if I don’t know if people are buying ’cause of my emails and like whenever I feel like something is going not as I expect, I just have to go to my emails and it will tell me what’s going on.

Like, I just had a launch and I was like, hmm, things feel really quiet. Like I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand. And I’d been away. I always launch when I’m away. So like I’m not thinking about it all the time. And I went to look at Kit and my email, my click rate was up, my open rate was up, my unsubscribe rate was non-existent.

Like people were reading exactly what you just described. People were reading, they were digesting, they were going to read, and then they were coming at me on another platform to say, oh, what about this? Can you answer this? Help me with this. And I think the old view, like I always think of the way things are at the moment.

Like pre 2020 and post 2020. So like the pre 2020 view of like email value once a week, send a newsletter. Then when you’re in launch, email once a day, send at the same time every day. All of that stuff is kind of bs because I know from my own experience, I’ve got clients who are advocates of mine, huge advocates.

I know they would read an email, they used to read an email as soon as it landed in their inbox, but they’re busy. They’re busy with client stuff. I know they now save those emails to read when they’re having their coffee or when they’re, let’s be honest, on the loo, like they are saving them in their inbox and reading ’em at a later date.

And I’ll get replies like days later, like, oh, I love this email. It was great. Or, oh, can you like answer this question? And I think all of us are trained in this, in this current world to be like, oh, no one’s responded straight away. That means everyone hated it. Whereas actually, I think a lot of our audiences are just being a lot more discerning and they’re getting a lot more information.

So they’re saving the good stuff for when they have time to properly interact with it.

Colie: Yeah, and I mean sometimes it’s, I I love that we’re talking about this approach of like all of your emails as a whole, because I feel like there was a lot of talk maybe a few years ago when people were creating courses pre 2020 if we will, where it was like, okay, but what email was the one that pushed them over the edge?

And you know, you would send out an email and you would notice that someone bought, but it wasn’t from that email. It was from four emails ago. And then they were like, okay, but that’s the email that triggered them. And it’s like, but no, this last email that landed in their inbox. You know, got their attention in some way to where it reminded them of the previous email.

And so they went back, they reread it, they clicked, and then they buy. And so it’s not really this, which particular email got them to buy. It is definitely like an ecosphere. It is definitely, um, compounding visibility, as I’ve heard you say in the past. You know, every single thing that you’re doing is building on what you did before.

And so it’s not that you can take any one of these pieces and be like, that is why they bought it, is, you know, the culmination of all of them together. And so that is why tracking your habits or your behavior, as you say, is so important because you do want to make sure that you can see what, um, actions you are taking.

That is helping your buyers and your audience make decisions. Because at the end of the day, you have no control over what they do. You have total control over what you do. And so yes, if you do a blackout, if you haven’t been on Instagram for like two weeks, that’s definitely going to affect whether or not the people in your audience buy.

But that’s the one thing that you can control. Like on Instagram, you can’t control who sees your shit in an email. You can control if they get it, but you can’t control if they open it. So I mean, I just, I love everything that you say about compounded visibility, and you know, you can only control what you can control, and so why not track that and see what you are doing that is having the biggest impact on your bottom line, on sales, on people asking you thoughtful questions, all of those things.

Zoe: That’s, I mean, you’ve just done a much better job than I could of explaining like my whole ethos. ’cause like, I, I just, it’s, and it’s all come from a selfish place, right? Like, I have come from a place of spending a year buying everything that I could see because I wanted to be doing better and.

Colie: Mm-hmm.

Zoe: Everything that I was buying was like, you should do this because this is gonna be the next thing that’s gonna, but they’re all tactics. Like tactics do change. Marketing strategy has not changed in a hundred years. Like, and it probably won’t change for another hundred, it’s just that the tactics people are using to put that strategy into place change.

But there’s no point in you adopting those tactics if you don’t know what works for you in the first place. And it’s all about layering those tactics on top of the things that are already working. Like, and for something to be working, I would class it as I enjoy doing it and it’s giving me a return. If those two things aren’t both there, then it’s not something that you should be doing in your business.

And I know like, so LinkedIn for instance. I know that LinkedIn is a place that is full of people that I should be working with. I know that, like my and my brother has had, my brother’s a videographer. He’s had huge success on LinkedIn. He’s, that’s why he’s got a business. ’cause he built his, his network on LinkedIn and he says to, he literally, yesterday he emailed me a list of, I mean, neurodivergent family or what he lists.

He emailed me a list of content ideas that I could use on LinkedIn posts that were prewritten that he’d done for me. And I was like

Colie: That’s a good brother.

Zoe: Yeah. Um, I mean he was, he was testing out some tech that he, he was trying, but anyway, he, he emailed me this and I was like, this is great, but I don’t enjoy being there.

So there is no point in me spending time trying to make LinkedIn happen when I don’t enjoy being there. I don’t like. I don’t like what I have to do to show up there, and I don’t see a return from it because I don’t enjoy being there. So there’s, there’s no, there’s, you know, there’s no point in me doing that.

Whereas email, I find it so easy. So it’s easy for me to email and I get a return from it because I find it easy and because it’s, it’s easy to show up. Instagram is a little bit of a, like a, like I don’t mind it. And I do see a return, but I have to work at it. But I can say that I know that my business is in business because I, I’m relentless at the things I enjoy doing.

But that is also ’cause I see a return on them, but I only see a return on them ’cause I track what I’m doing, you know? 

Colie: Yeah, so your email list is like your gold and I’ve had so many people on here recently that have said that, but, so I’m just curious, what is your biggest driver to get people on your email list? Is it your freebies? ’cause you have some pretty fabulous ones. And I will say that even though I’m, you know, in your ethos, I’m, I’m in your world.

I feel like a few of your freebies I’ve only seen because I’ve been on threats. So is that where you are getting the biggest driver of people joining your email list or is it something

Zoe: Well in, in a sentence that will not surprise you in any way. I track where everyone comes from onto my list. and so threads, I would say people take action quicker on threads for sure. So new people come to me from threads, a hundred percent. Existing people come back into my world from Instagram, so it might be that they’ve left my list and they come back onto it.

I’ll be honest, I’m not great at growing my email list. Like I will grow it and then I’ll cull. Because I wanna keep it tight. That has harmed me more than it’s benefited me. I would say, like I’m not able to go and participate in some of the bigger things that, where you need a big list. But because I keep it so tight, the vanity metrics are great.

Like my open rate, 60%, my unsubscribed rate is about not point, not five. And the main way recently that I’ve grown my list is through ads like my freebie. So I was, I’m not, I’m not currently doing ads. I stopped doing them maybe about three weeks ago. Because I just needed new, new eyes. And how’d you get new eyes?

I mean, you either collaborate, so like you go and find someone else who is adjacent to you. And I have done that as well. I’ve done freebie swaps with people and I have had success with that. But because I could really dial into the person that I wanted to bring into my world and the freebie that I knew would bring them in, I was getting leads for like 70 p on Facebook.

Not leads people onto my list. So, I think, I think a lot of people are sleeping on Facebook ads ’cause they think they’re super expensive, but they don’t have to be. And I probably grew my list by about 200 in a very short space of time. And then I turned them off ’cause I just needed to tweak things.

But yeah, threat, I’m, I’m just not, I, I’ll be honest, like being vulnerable. I’m not great at putting stuff out there like that, that second thing of like putting out offers and being visible or the first thing and the second thing, I’m so much better at sharing free stuff than I am things that you have to pay for.

And that’s on my mindset. But when I generally, when I put stuff out to, and also, my personal Facebook profile, like it’s really old school, but I have. I don’t really show up very much on Facebook. So when I do, people seem to take notice. It’s just everything, share everything. I was in the, um, kit creator network for a little while, but I found that a lot of the people that came through kind of didn’t.

I think the way they had it set up, they didn’t, people didn’t really understand that they were also subscribing to me when they subscribe to someone else. So it is like a bit, a bit of an odd mix. but yeah, thread, I love threads. Threads is like mini emails for me.

Colie: Well let’s talk about the Creator Network just really briefly. ’cause some people might not know what it is. So when you are using Kit as your email marketing program, they have established a way to where if someone is signing up for my list, for example, I can recommend that they may also enjoy Zoe’s list.

And so after they click on mine, they’re presented with a screen of my recommendations of who I think they might enjoy. And I, like you was getting tons of people. I’m no longer using Kit for my email marketing, but when I was, I was getting quite a few people from those and I found it absolutely fascinating what people would do.

’cause I was of course tagging them with Creator Network so that I knew who was coming into my list specifically from that. And what I was finding was that there were certain people. That were very aligned with what I do and what their offers were, and those people stuck around, which I mean, makes total common sense.

But then I had some people who were like maybe a good fit for my offer and they enjoyed listening to me, but I was not an aligned fit for the people who were joining their email list because their email people had very different needs and it didn’t seem to be what I was offering. So those people actually exited my list like quite quickly.

But I found it fascinating when I was finally able to identify, okay, but these people are like, they’re bringing in leads that are staying on my email list for months, maybe even past a year. But this other one, I mean, on average they’re only staying like three days to three weeks and then they’re leaving, or you know, they join my email list and then they’re never reading any of the emails.

And so that was, that’s also, you know, a very interesting thing to be able to track and see. Okay. You know, is it that they should stay on my email list? ’cause of course, with Kit. If you’re paying for every single person, and so it’s like, hmm, no, I think I should unsubscribe you myself and move on.

Zoe: Yeah, and I think that’s also like, that speaks. Very much to the type of marketing those people are doing. So who are, like, where are they bringing in people from? What are they doing to like, keep their list hygiene good? Like there’s so, and again, but that’s something else we can’t control. So like, so whilst it’s great, we don’t know.

So, you know, if say you were running ads, you brought someone onto your list, they also signed up for mine. All you’ve done is funnel that person in from wherever they’ve seen your advert. Whereas if it’s someone who doesn’t run ads and they ha do organic marketing, they bring people in through their podcast, they’re much more connected to the people who are joining their list.

There probably would be a better fit. So it’s, it’s, I find list growth in that way really hard. But I would like, I will die on this hill. You don’t need a big audience to make six figures and you. Far too many people concentrate on growth, and I say that I work with people to grow their business through their own DA data and metrics.

I don’t mean grow their audience, I mean grow their revenue. And the majority of the time that revenue is gonna come from maybe 40 people who are already in their audience and aligned offer and communications and retention, like they’re the things that grow a business. Not until you are wanting to make like 3 million a year, like the bigger audience is not gonna make you the money that you are wanting it to make you.

Colie: Yeah, and I love that you say that you got 200 people and then you stopped because like, the data girl in me is just like, okay, but I wanna know what happens with those 200 people before I turn that ad back on. Like, is it, is it worth whatever it is that I’m paying for these leads? Because again, if you are just focused on growth, growth, growth, and you don’t actually know what’s happening with these new people that you’re bringing into your list, you could perhaps be, you know, just talking into the void.

These are people that are never gonna go anywhere no matter how well you nurture them or you know, how many of your habits you track when you’re talking to them. So I, I would personally do that. I would bring 200 people in and then just kind of watch ’em for a while. Like, how are they, how are they interacting with your emails and those things?

And then, hey, if those people end up like buying quicker than you were currently tracking and like those things, yeah, go turn that ad back on. Because that’s a winner. But if all these people are staying on your email list for, you know, like three, four weeks and then they’re ghosting, they’re never opening your emails, well, no matter how cheap those leads were, those are not the ones that are gonna help you grow your revenue going forward.

So maybe something needs to be tweaked before you run ads

Zoe: Exactly. And like my normal data set’s a hundred. But they just, they were working better than I kind of thought they would. ’cause I’m not, I haven’t had the best, the kind of success with ads in the past. But I know that’s because I didn’t have an aligned freebie. Like it’s just all this ecosystem that we talk about and I know people.

Colie: Everything works

Zoe: Yeah. And um, and it’s only through being so sure in my own. My own business that I am able to confidently make those decisions and be like, no, that’s not working for me. Or, or confidently even say to mentors and people that I’ve paid, that doesn’t work for me. There’s no point in me trying it. I know, you know, and I’ve, I’ve been pushed back and people have said, you’ve not got enough data to make that decision.

I’m like, you’re speaking to the wrong person, because I do have enough data to know this isn’t working. And so, and it’s so, you know, when you start to understand what your normals are. So like, if I send out an email, I would, and it’s like, I sent an email today. It was quite a vulnerable email, quite a long email.

And I, I normally would expect a reply from someone, like someone who’s probably been around for a while, either a reply to the email or a message on, uh, WhatsApp or Instagram. I would normally expect that within an hour. And I’ll, I kind of will know how it’s hit based on the response I get. And, um. I know how responsive my people are, basically.

That’s what I’m trying to say. And so when I create a freebie, for instance, or do a training or um, run a masterclass or anything like that, I’ll know within the first half a day if I’ve chosen the right topic, if the title’s working, if the, if the page is working. And then because I know where to go and find all my numbers and like this is getting a little bit off topic, but it’s still in terms of tracking, I can go and see, okay, what’s the sales page numbers?

And this happened to me recently. Why is no one signing up for this? I don’t understand. This is what they told me that they want. Yeah. Why are they not telling? And it was because of the title a hundred percent. But also when I looked at the numbers, 20 people had seen the sales page and I’d had 13 sign up.

The problem wasn’t the the signup page. The problem was that I had not driven enough people to that page. And I think a lot of the time we can jump to, oh my God, woe is me like. Everything’s shit. I do. I shouldn’t be doing this anymore. And actually, the only thing that’s not gonna lie to you is the data that you’ve got in front of you.

And yes, it can be interpreted, interpreted in different ways, but the, that’s the only cold, hard facts you can go on. ’cause people will lie to you. They’ll go, oh, I’m busy that day, or, oh, I didn’t see it. Whereas actually, if you had a hundred people visit your page and two signed up, okay, well there’s something wrong with that page.

Is the, is the, is the form working? Is the copy off? Is the offer wrong? know, like there’s so many things that can go wrong, but you can’t make those decisions until you’ve actually looked at what the numbers are telling you.

Colie: Okay, so we’ve talked about these habits, these, these behaviors that we are in control of, that we need to track hopefully inside of an awesome Airtable template. And then we’ve kind of gone broader to talk about some of the data that like everybody tells you that you should be tracking. Like look at your open rates, your click rates, how many people are landing on your sales page so that you know that it’s not like technical error if your conversion rate is very low.

But then what is the next step? Because. I mean, the next step to me is come hire Zoe and have her look at your shit and tell you where the, where the holes are. Like that’s the fun part. That’s the thing that I’m like, if I ever decide to change careers, that’s what I wanna do next. But like if someone isn’t quite ready to make the jump, like what is it that they will be able to look at to know if they even have enough data for someone like you to jump in and decipher?

Because I do feel like that is sometimes what, like the jump is. That’s what the disconnect is, is people will be like, oh, well, I mean like I’m looking at these numbers, but like, is this enough for someone to actually tell me, or do I need to continue to work at it? It’s like how much is enough before you can actually start to see patterns and make data-driven decisions for your marketing and your sales and all of the things.

Zoe: I mean, if you are putting offers out there and you are making sales, you have enough data to be making data-driven decisions. If you are a brand new business, like pre-revenue as they call it, you probably don’t have enough data to be making data driven decisions, and you kind of just need to start selling to, to, or at least putting an offer out there, even if that’s your freebie.

So the things that I would do to begin with install Google Analytics on your website or like install some sort of, I mean I use Google Analytics so I dunno why you wouldn’t do that ’cause it’s free. But install something where you can see how many people are landing on the pages that you’re putting out there.

Number one, I mean, you might use something like pretty links if you want it to be, if you wanna be super tracky about it. But Google and Google Analytics is probably good enough. Google Analytics is so easy to look at. You do not have to go to analytics.google.com. You can install it on your website and use whatever plugin that is available on your website.

Don’t think that you have to get in the weeds of setting up. Events and tracking links and all of that, you don’t, it will literally just sit and read your website. Another tool that I really like is Microsoft Clarity. Now I have always had a WordPress website and I have never fucked with Squarespace or Wix. And if you have a Squarespace or Wix

Colie: didn’t mention mines. Mines Show it.

Zoe: Oh shit. Yeah, but show it, show it is based on WordPress. So like that’s fine.

Colie: It.

Zoe: So like, yeah, so it’s like, I’ve always just done WordPress, so I’m, and I’m not a website designer, so like, I can’t speak to other platforms, but Microsoft Clarity is like Hotjar, if you know what Hotjar is.

So, but it’s free, so you can, um, it will record user behavior on your website so you can see what people are seeing and what people are doing on your website and like how far they’re getting, are they clicking buttons and basically just start to take an in. I mean, I’m, I’m very much concentrating on website, but I think if you are.

Wanting to make more sales and that is how you sell, then that is where you kind of need to be sitting. If you use an all in one tool, like uh, something that’s go high level or Kartra or Kajabi, there will be places in those platforms where it will tell you how many visitors you’ve had to that page. I don’t know them well enough to tell you where to go and look, but there will be opportunities for you to see that.

And basically you need to look to see if you are getting, when you put out an offer, whether that’s to your lead magnet or for a sale, are people interested enough that they’re going to look at that offer? That’s the first thing to look at. So if you have sent a hundred people to that page, how many have taken the action that you want ’em to take?

And I was speaking to a copywriter recently and she was saying, how can you make claims on launches when there’s so much that’s out of your control? ’cause she was saying that she, you know, she writes copy for launches and she finds it really hard to make a promise based on the copy that she writes. I feel like if you have done everything within your power to get people to that page and get them to take action, there is something else going on in the, in the ecosystem that means that it’s not right for them.

And it’s probably that you haven’t nurtured them enough, they don’t trust you enough to, to make a purchase. It’s probably not the copy, it’s probably not the offer. Because if people are landing on the page and they’re spending time on the page, there’s something that you haven’t done to get them to purchase.

And that’s why the email and the content marketing around everything that you’re doing matters so much. So the first thing I would look at is how many people are coming to look at that page and are they taking the action you want to take? So are they clicking a button or are they signing up? Are they filling in a form?

If you are, if you’re not making sales at the moment, is it that you’re asking ’em to sign up for a lead magnet? Are people signing up for the lead magnet? And once you start to do that, you can then start to work out what your conversion rates are. So if you know that a gen in general, a lead magnet page for you converts at, I don’t know, 40%, okay, great.

When you make a sale, how does that compare? So like you, uh, your people, people who love freebies, or are they people who take action, start to track like what, what the difference is with those two things? For a long time, I was someone who, people would love my free stuff and wouldn’t purchase anything from me, but it’s ’cause I was giving so much away for free.

I was like, what? You know that that line is so thin that you have to tread. And then once people are, signed up for your freebie, okay, so they’re in your email world. Now, if you are emailing out sales emails or, or offer emails, how many of them are actually going through to the page? Are they doing it multiple times?

All of this sounds like really boring, but once you start to track it. So I’ll give you an example and I’ll give you a B2C example of a client that I’ve got at the moment. She runs a theater ticket company, so she sells group rate theater tickets to customers. So she buys a group of tickets and then she’ll go and sell them for cheap, cheaper than you would buy in in the West end.

And she, um, I put, I started to track all of her sales for her, and she had always made an assumption that because she’s in the business world, she had made an assumption that, uh, no one was buying at the weekends. Like all of the sales came through Monday to Thursday, pretty much. And so she would do all of her marketing Monday to Friday.

And when she started to track, she, she saw very, very quickly the majority of her sales. Every week happened on a Sunday at around four o’clock. Because she was reporting weekly. She was just kind of seeing an uplift at the end of the week and not, not really pinpointing it to anything. So now she knows she can send an email on a Saturday night and a Sunday afternoon and it will hit the people who are looking to make sales and she doesn’t really need to do much in the week ’cause everyone’s buying it the weekend because it’s B2C, whereas she’d been following the advice of B2B people of like no one works at the weekends.

Like turn everything off. And the most important thing to do is just start taking an interest in your numbers. And I understand that it’s really easy for me as someone who is great at pattern recognition and loves numbers to go, you’ll start to see patterns. But honestly, you will like it. It’s, you will start to see spikes, you know, if you set, especially on Airtable, ’cause we love Airtable.

If you have a chart set up that shows you when your interactions come in, or like when you’ve had inquiries or when you’ve had sales, and you can map it to certain things that have happened in your business. Then that’s just so powerful that you can then go and repeat that. You’re not just kind of spraying and praying.

Colie: Yeah, and I mean, going back to one of the things that you said was if people are going to your website and they’re reading your sales page and they’re not buying, it might be that you haven’t nurtured them enough, but I feel like so many people just assume that it’s a no. They don’t ever like represent that offer to that particular person until they’re in a full launch again, versus, I mean, what if you could figure out that it takes your average person 30 days to be ready to buy, but you’re not representing the offer to them in another 90?

You’re like, oh, well they know where the sales page is. If they want it, they’ll go get it. That’s not what people do. Like, so if you know from, you know, data that you’re looking at, that when someone joins your list, that it takes them an average of 30 or 60 days. Are you representing that offer to them in 30 days?

I mean, even if it’s just one to two emails, it’s like, Hey, you know, you previously read about this. This is this new piece of information, this new client testimonial that I got. This is a win that, you know, whatever it is that you want to share to get them re-interested in looking at it. How many sales could you make if that’s all that you did, and you won’t know what that optimal time length is.

Unless you’re tracking and you’re actually putting the offer back out to the same people a month later, two months later. Now, it’s also about, like, we’ve been talking a lot about numerical data, and recently I’ve been jumping into, you know, well, what are people saying when they don’t buy? Because I feel like that’s another piece of the data, and it’s not numerical, but it also helps you.

So I’m going back and seeing, okay, so when people didn’t buy my course in May, all of them said that if they wanted, if they had a choice between hiring somebody to do it or taking a course that they would want to take the course and so they didn’t buy. These are people who actively want to take a course.

So what, you know, what timeline is it that I could show them the offer again, show them why the course is the best way, like all of these things. But if you’re not looking at the data that you’re collecting, whether it is numerical or not, you can’t make those kinds of decisions in your business, which is really stunting your growth.

And like Zoe said, we’re not talking about growing your audience, we’re talking about growing your revenue.

Zoe: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think that’s a really key point that you are touching on there. Like all of us tell ourselves stories about why people don’t like us. They didn’t buy so they don’t like me and they don’t like me because X, Y, Z actually. They, you know, I had a client who just finished so at the, the full forwards, like, which you mentioned earlier, like they, they didn’t come in.

They, they’d done a 12 week with me over the summer and they didn’t come in again in Autumn. I didn’t make any assumptions about why I just thought what they got. They had probably got what they needed from me and they know what to do now so they can continue. And she just said, I’m not buying in quarter four.

Like, I’m just not investing in anything in quarter four. It’s not that, you know, I would’ve joined, but I didn’t want, it’s not that I didn’t want to, but I’ve already made a commitment to myself that I’m not investing anything in this quarter. Um, or, you know, oh, I’ve just, I’m going like, another classic one is I want to, to join, but I’m not going to be here so I can’t make the most of it because I’m not gonna be in the country or I’m gonna be doing X, Y, Z and having a why you didn’t buy survey is such a key metric that not enough people look at.

We just make assumptions that it wasn’t the right offer for them and, they weren’t interested. Whereas that’s probably the least number of reason, like why that would happen. And I think something that I have to remind myself all the time is human behavior doesn’t change The timing. Like the timing of people taking action or the way in which they respond might change.

But if someone doesn’t like what you’re talking about, they will leave you. They’ll unfollow you. They’ll unsubscribe. They will take themselves out. You don’t need to worry about it. And if people do like what you’re talking about, they will react and tell you. We can tell ourselves the story that they, you know, behavior has changed and people aren’t as vocal anymore.

And, they’re interested but they don’t wanna be too keen. That’s not

Colie: Silent, lurking.

Zoe: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But people, people will just remove themselves from your world. If, if it’s not what they want, if they’re still around, they. Will stay around until what you say speaks to them or you offer them something that they’re gonna take action on and otherwise they’re just ambivalent.

And that’s fine. They can hang around and they can keep being nurtured. Um, but majority of people will take action when it is something that they want. Um, and that isn’t ever gonna change.

Colie: And I also just think that it’s our job as business owners to make that, to put the offer to where they can actually make a choice. ’cause again, I think a lot of us assume, oh, well I sent them a link before, and so when they’re ready they’ll just come back. Yeah. That’s not how humans work. I mean, and it could be that you’ve got people in your audience that are ready and they’ve just forgotten that it was a priority.

They’re ready, and life got in the way. And all it might take from you is a single email to remind them why they were interested in the first place. And it could be, ’cause like one of the things that I heard in May. Again, like I don’t really take it personally when people don’t buy from me, but a lot of people said that they currently didn’t have enough clients to justify the cost of buying the course and setting up their CRM.

Well, it was May and this year has been very strange for a lot of people. And whereas in the past, like in past years, mostly pre pandemic may would’ve been where people started to get a lot of photography inquiries. Now those are coming in July and August. And so me knowing that my clients, the ones that have actually hired me, are getting more inquiries in July and August.

Anybody that said they didn’t have enough clients to justify the cost in May probably has enough clients now to justify the cost. And so it’s not on them to be like, oh, I have all of these clients and I’m trying to fulfill them, but let me go buy that course that Colie mentioned to me two or three months ago.

No, it’s up to me to put it back in front of you so that if it is a better time, if you are financially able to purchase it right now, if it is actually going to help you with your business and manage your goals, it’s really up to me to put it back in front of you, especially if you’re still on my email list.

Like, isn’t that why we have an email list?

Zoe: Yeah. I think like one of the lessons I learned way back when I first went self-employed was, no one cares what you look like. No one cares what you sound like and no one cares what you’re talking about. So why aren’t you talking about it more? ’cause no one cares. So. Just keep talking about it. If you care, you keep talking about it because you need to get people to take notice and people, and I’m, I’m very much do as I say, not as I do.

Like I’m not, I’m not great at like repetitive messaging. Um, I’m trying to get better at it. But you, there’s someone that I, I dunno if you’ve come across her, Hannah Stead. So she runs, her whole approach is 10 minute marketing and her messaging is so repetitive, but it’s ’cause it’s great. Like she doesn’t need this fancy, you don’t need to say it.

Whatever you, whatever your hill that you, you’re dying on is, you don’t need to say it’s differently to someone else. You just need to say it more than them. And that is what you are gonna be remembered for. That is what you’re gonna be associated with and known for. Like you said about me before, talking about compact compounding visibility.

I must have spoken about that quite a lot recently. Like it’s definitely something that’s in my head. All your actions. Compounding is what makes a difference. Not having a different approach every day, um, and being known for those things is what makes a difference. And that’s how you end up getting recommended.

That’s how your people become advocates. Um, someone put a, I can’t remember who it was now. Someone put a thing on Instagram, I think it was Kelsey from Coming Up Roses. She put a, story or, or a reel up the other day that was saying, what is your hook?

Like, what are people associating with you with? So whenever you see me on camera, generally I’m gonna be wearing pink, and that is because I always

Colie: not the Barbie one today

Zoe: know it’s not the Barbie one today. Do you know what it is today? It’s a loner Mars Brand Beast Beauty Beast. Beauty brains. So I generally will always wear Pink, pink nails.

Um. That’s, you know, I think that is a visual clue as to who’s speaking on camera, but I do genuinely love pink. It’s not me, it’s not like a bit for me. But if you, if unlike, I went to an event yesterday and probably half a dozen people said, oh, have you got your sourdough out yet for Autumn? Because every year, for the past six years in, in autumn, I’ve been making sourdough.

And like I’ve got a sourdough starter called Sheila. And like it’s just this hook that people know me for. Um, and so the more that you can do that and have people anchor into what you are doing, the more that everything else that you are doing will matter to them and they will start to care. And the people who care are the people who are gonna make a purchase with you.

But that only happens once you start to know what it is that people are gonna connect to.

Colie: I mean, Zoe, we have to cut this off eventually because otherwise you and I could just sit here and chat forever, y’all. We had like a pre-chat a few, a few weeks ago. And I, I think, I don’t even remember how long we talked, but it was a very, very long time. But bottom line, I think that we are both telling everybody in this audience, don’t be scared of your data and you need to be tracking your habits and your behaviors, because again, that is the only thing that you have control over.

But Zoe, like if people wanna hear more about you talking about the importance of your data and your metrics, like where should they go and what fabulous freebie should they check out? I’m gonna ask you specifically for one, because you know, you have lots of them that are amazing, but like, what, what is the freebie that someone should actually look at after listening to this particular conversation?

Zoe: So, the place that I hang out the most is Instagram. It’s Zoe, R-D-U-Z-O-E-R-D-E-W. I am starting a YouTube channel. Actually, I’m in the process of doing it. So, um, so that’s being set up at the moment. It’ll be the, it’s the same handle, Z-O-E-R-D-E-W, I’m that across everything. I am gonna give you a link to a freebie that is not out publicly, but you can have it ’cause it’s what we’ve spoken about today.

So, it is a habit tracker, so it will, it’s something that you can just start, it’s a one pager PDF, where you can just print it off weekly and just tick, have I been visible today? Did I make an offer today? Did I deliver value to my clients today? Did I speak to someone in my network today? And then track, and then you can note down your sales and inquiries as well.

And it was so hard for me not to put together an Airtable tracker, but. Like it’s, it’s just, I know that’s not for everyone. So what is the lowest barrier to entry use A PDF? Easy. Okay. Cool. So that’s the best thing to do. Yeah.

Colie: Ugh. Zoe, thank you so much for coming on. And guys, listen, if you don’t follow Zoe on Threads, I highly recommend that you go do that because she is a riot, and I promise that the way that she talks about looking at the data and metrics in your business makes it completely scary. Most of you on this podcast say, Colie, I’m not afraid of systems, because you make them seem fun and exciting.

Zoe is the version of me when it comes to your data and their metrics in your business. I promise you will be entertained and you will feel compelled to take action in your business after following her. Alright, so. The link to the freebie is in the show notes. I expect all of you to go click it and download it and start writing down your habits.

And listen, I’m interested to know, if you start doing these habits every day, because you know, the more that you do in your business, the more you are going to grow your revenue. And if you start with these habits, these are the things that you can control. All right, Zoe, thank you very much for joining me.

That is it for this episode. See you next

Zoe: Thank you. Bye.