You will gather a month of email results into one page and decide three changes for next month.
Most small businesses look at email results one send at a time, if at all. They glance at the report the next morning, feel good or bad about it, and move on. A month later they cannot say whether email is doing better or worse than before, and when someone asks whether it is worth the time, they have a feeling rather than an answer.
A monthly review fixes that. Once a month, you pull every result into one page, look for patterns, and make three decisions. It takes about thirty minutes once the habit is set. This exercise walks you through the first one, using the numbers you chose in lesson 8.2.
Start by listing every email that went out in the month. Include the newsletter issues, any one-off campaigns, and every automation flow: welcome, enquiry follow-up, abandoned cart, re-engagement, and anything else running. Flows are easy to forget because they run in the background, but they often send more email than the newsletter does.
For each send or flow, record the numbers you decided to track in lesson 8.2: emails delivered, click rate, conversions or revenue if you can trace them, unsubscribes and complaints. For flows, use the month's totals for the flow as a whole, and note any single email in it that stands out as much better or worse than the rest.
Finish with the list itself: subscribers at the start of the month, new subscribers, losses, and subscribers at the end.
Conversions only show up if your website analytics know which visits came from email. If you added UTM tags in lesson 8.2, check they are working: in your analytics, look for traffic from the source and medium you used, such as newsletter and email, during the month.
If some links were not tagged, note which ones and turn on automatic UTM tagging in your email tool if it offers it, so next month's review is complete. Make sure the tags follow the same naming every month, or your analytics will split one campaign into several rows. The course Marketing analytics: GA4, attribution and testing covers a naming convention in lesson 2.2, A naming convention your whole team can follow.
With everything on one page, look across it rather than at each row. Which topics earned the most clicks? Which segments, from module 6, clicked and bought most? Which flow produced the most bookings or orders for the emails it sent? Did unsubscribes jump after any particular send? Is net list growth positive?
Compare with last month if you have it. The first review has no comparison, which is fine. Its main job is to set the baseline for next month.
Here is Priya's example first review, on one page.
She sent two newsletter issues to about 300 parents. The fraction mistakes issue had a click rate of 9 percent and the exam timetable issue had 3 percent. Her welcome flow sent 112 emails to 28 new subscribers, and 4 of them booked trial classes. Her enquiry follow-up flow handled 19 enquiries, and 11 booked trials, 3 of them only after the follow-up email. Unsubscribes were low on everything except the timetable issue, which lost 5 parents. Net list growth was positive.
Her table had one row per send or flow, with columns for delivered, click rate, bookings and unsubscribes, plus a short line for the list's start size, gains, losses and end size.
Her three decisions were short. Keep: practical how-to topics, since the fraction issue earned three times the click rate of the timetable one. Change: send exam and timetable news only to enrolled families as a conditional block, since non-enrolled parents ignored it and some left. Stop: the third email in the welcome sequence, which almost nobody clicked; she would merge its one useful tip into email two.
Every review ends with three written decisions: one thing to keep, one to change, and one to stop. Write them as specific actions, with the reason beside each, so next month you can check whether you did them and whether they helped.
Three is enough. A review that ends with twelve ideas usually leads to none of them being done. If you notice more, put them on a list for later months.
Your report fits on one page. It lists every send and flow from the month with your tracked numbers, has one table or simple chart that shows them together, records the list's growth, and ends with three decisions and their reasons. Pull your month's results now, and assemble the one-page report the activity below describes.
Produce a one-page monthly email report with your five tracked numbers, one chart or table, and three written decisions for next month.
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