Defining Your Bedrock Digital Metrics
Among a sea of data -- what's worth measuring?
Which metrics should niche publishers be focused on?
In the past, the answer would have been print statistics.
Reader demographics, age, wealth, physical location. And for print products, these metrics continue to reign supreme.
But we’re in an increasingly digital age. It’s easier than ever to get more and more data.
But what to do with it?
“What get’s measured gets managed.”
~ Peter Drucker
Measuring the wrong things leads to a lot of useless wheel-spinning.
We believe the number and quality of your engaged email subscribers should be your bedrock metric.
Are people paying attention to you?
When you show up in their inbox, do they take time to listen to what you have to say?
Do they see you as trusted, authoritative, and worthy of attention?
When you go looking for digital proof that your organization is trusted, the engaged email is your bedrock metric.
Is Print Dead?
Not at all.
John Garrett at Community Impact has handily convinced us that print isn’t dead — not by a long shot.
He’s convinced us that print and digital can be highly complementary.
Communicating to your audience means meeting them in their preferred medium. Increasing your surface area leads to quality multifaceted engagement.
But while print continues to have a place at the party, it cannot be the star of the party long term.
The average person spends 6h40m per day on screens.
The average person spends 15m per day reading physical media.
Here’s the brutal reality.
A print-centric organization cannot thrive apart from a digital presence.
But the converse is not true.
Digital organizations are being spawned every day that don’t require print whatsoever to be profitable.
These are lean, profitable, and driven organizations with low overhead. They leverage these strengths into sizable digital audiences.
“Online only”, however, is not the only way forward. It simply illustrates that print’s role has changed and continues to change.
Because your product is trust, not “print”, we face the digital future with confidence and certainty.
“Engaged” Email?
What makes an email “engaged”?
We talked to several experts in the space, and faced an unfortunate reality.
There’s no silver bullet.
“Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.”
~ Charlie Munger
We already know that email open rates aren’t a reliable metric.
We know number of subscribers can be artificially inflated.
We know we can game eyeballs by writing ragebait trash.
Is the answer some combination of the above?
Something else entirely?
Will Hill suggests it should be action-centric:
when my Editor gets an email saying "after your feature on us, our domestic violence program received more calls in a day than we had all last year" you know you're on the right track.
Will Hill at County10
It’s easy to set a vanity metric, watch it go up, and think you’re “winning”. But that’s also a quick ticket to wheel-spinning.
This is the closest angle we’ll leave you with:
Trust breeds engagement, but engagement is not automatically trust.