How optimizing metrics can eviscerate an otherwise good and prosperous business

I hopped on a client call yesterday. 

Her account is a weird one: She has a TON of customers on our Autoship program (sumtin that I’ve promoted time and time again in my emails even though, technically, it has a negative impact on how good I look at my job - why you ask? simple, once a customer is on Autoship, I don’t get full credit for their future purchases. Alas, I’m in the business of serving clients’ businesses, not serving my ego.) 

To make a less-than-ideal situation worse, a few months back (after a series of failing ad campaigns because the old control that used to be published in magazines stopped converting out of the blue - mostly because magazine readership has fallen off a cliff) my client decided to turn off ads completely. 

Now, she already has one of the smallest lists out of any of my clients. And she just turned off the spigot that brought in new leads. 

The past few months have been an uphill battle for your humble daily-ish narrator here. 

I’m already working with a small pool of leads. Most of the customers (also a small pool) are on Autoship. And there’s no new source of leads coming in. 

Well, I finally got her to try advertising again. There’s only so much juice I can squeeze from a drained lemon. Instead of print ads, she wanted to try digital ads for the first time.

And that turned the “lead spigot” on full blast! 

At least compared to what we were getting. 

She’s not doing massive numbers with her new advertising campaign - but there have been about 150 or so new leads entering our world in the past couple of weeks. Many of these leads have already become customers. 

But the delta in lead flow between the beginning of April and the beginning of May couldn’t have been more significant. 

And so, as we celebrate cracking the “top of the funnel” code, she started to unintentionally get in her own way: 

Since we have so many new leads coming in, she reached out wanting me to set up an old A/B test of the welcome series (which I’ve already tested, and proven, that my version converts several ticks higher than the B version). 

Her reasoning? 

She tried to compare “apples to oranges” metrics in Klaviyo. 

For example: 

The browse abandonment flow had a higher $/recipient metric and a slightly higher Average Order Value (AOV) than my welcome. 

My response?

I strongly advised her against this line of action. 

Not only is a browse abandonment flow supposed to have a higher $/recipient number (a browse abandonment flow is a natural qualification filter because it only sends to folks who viewed a certain product - an action that’s a step above filling out a form to join the email list), but even the AOV metric was inaccurate because we offer a one-time discount code in the welcome - something we don’t offer in the browse abandonment flow. 

See how deceptive and shifty metrics can be?

Here’s the part to put into your pipe and smoke on: 

Almost every marketing metric (or statistic in general) suffers from the same fate of inaccuracy. 

Metrics can’t factor in context. 

This is why an obsession over metrics (and boosting metrics no matter the consequences) is a failing strategy. The bad news is most marketers fall into this trap of praying at the altar of metrics. 

Doesn’t matter whether it’s a $/recipient metric, an AOV metric, an open rate metric, or any other metrics that lesser marketers fap over (because they haven’t figured out how to do the one and only job of marketing - turn leads into customers). 

I told my client as much on our call:

The best way to increase the $/recipient number, for example, is to turn off the welcome flow completely. The same way the best way to get your unsubscribe metric to 0% is by never sending an email. 

Alas, you can’t go to any bank (at least none that I am aware of) and turn in your high open rate metric or low unsubscribe metric into cashola. 

Moral of the story?

Don’t blindly follow metrics. 

There are other things that are far more important to your business’s health. 

Like, for example, sending emails in a way that’s entertaining and persuasive. 

If’n you need help with that, hit reply and let’s chat. 

John