Before diving into metrics and analysis, let’s understand what makes people engage with your content. Your digital presence leaves clues about what your audience truly wants – beyond just what they say they want.
Finding the topic to write about your educational email course has more to do with your positioning rather than a random subject you’re knowledgeable about. The topic is about your target audience’s active interest and looking solutions to or are unaware about.
People land on your digital content due to a host of factors. Drama, answers, spectacle, the list goes on but curiosity is certain if intentional. It’s curiosity about some input you presented on your digital presence. To find the topic is to know why people visited you in the first place.
I like to present the approach as “answering the public”.
You do yourself a favor as a business by tracking at minimum some key metrics about your digital assets. At minimum page visits, duration, engagement, assessments, and some attribution (which is becoming hard each year). Note that I am not referring to websites or webpages only, because anyone can answer the public outside of a webpage – social media, books, in-person events and conversations.
Useful metrics for finding your email course topic Not all metrics are created equal. Some produce more noise than they do meaning to your business. From work experience across different teams, I’ve listed some of the more insightful metrics to consider:
Weak or junk metrics
Likes
It’s the junk food of social media. Unless a like is more fine-tuned through a subset of likes (such as LinkedIn where people provide a tone to the like), don’t count it as purposeful. They can be polite likes. They can be directionally incorrect likes such as commenting on pop culture or fads not relative to your business. The likes can come from writing to the incorrect audience (more on this below). Just smile and move on.
Subscriber, follower count
A large following doesn’t necessarily mean your content is resonating. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have a qualified audience either. You can spot this pattern on Youtube where any one channel has thousands of subscribers but the viewership is mismatched. Who are these subscribers?
Page views
Traffic alone does not mean impact. Who knows what type of quality the traffic is. It could be bots for all you know. Maybe you published a piece of content that went temporarily viral relative to your size but didn’t translate into much on your end.
Consider checking engagement from clicks and scroll depth as more impactful.
Open rates for email
Anyone can open an email but not everyone clicks on your links. Whatever your call to action on emails, track how many clicks happen. Software policy changes like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection make open rates all but meaningless.
Useful metrics
Bookmarking
This one is my favorite as it means you wrote something quite useful to another individual. Take note as it may mean you are producing content that is a subject matter related that provides in-depth insight. This is something sorely missing in the world of AI content.
What to Track: Not just bookmark counts, but bookmark-to-view ratios Example: If your article about “5-minute morning routines” gets bookmarked by 15% of viewers while your other content averages 3%, you’ve hit a pain point
Reshares
The amount of relative effort it takes to share means people are going through the trouble of sharing. You’ve likely spoken directly to your audience if this is a frequent occurrence. Either that, or you’re quite the controversial figure.
Quality Indicators: • Comments accompanying reshares • Professional annotations • Cross-platform sharing
Example: When your LinkedIn post about “common email marketing mistakes” gets reshared by marketing directors with their own insights, you’ve struck gold
Content Engagement Depth
SEO ranking: Do keep in mind people can be dethroned from their rankings but nonetheless you are doing the job of “answering the public” with high positioning.
Email click-through and conversion rates: It’s one thing to get opt-in rate, it’s another to have a high conversion rate. This doesn’t have to be a sale. It is anything you choose it to be like event registration or replying to the email.
Do keep in mind conversion rate ≠ click through rate. Any click can be just that – any click but high conversion rate means high intent.
Organic content impression count: This can be noisy at times like a spontaneous going viral moment. But large impression count from organic content means you are leveraging your digital assets correctly.
Given these metrics, it’s where you’ll find the topic for your educational email course.
What resonates deeply from audience that you could share more subject matter thought to it? Can you effectively create a sequence that goes into depth the topic?
The Awareness Journey: Meeting Your Audience Where They Are Effective marketing is understanding where to meet your audience. If you write to the wrong people you will get wrong outcomes. It is fundamental to understand who your target audience is and what awareness level they are in.
As a quick primer these are the 5 stages of awareness:
Completely Unaware Characteristic: No recognition of the problem
Problem Aware Characteristic: Knows the problem, not the solution
Solution Aware Characteristic: Knows solutions exist, needs direction
Product Aware Characteristic: Knows your product but hasn’t bought yet
Most Aware People know about your product and what it does.
So let me give you an example of how these awareness levels could apply to you using a real world example.
A real world example
Let’s take for example Jiu-jitsu. How do you sell the martial art? Who do you sell the martial art to? Well it can be anyone of any age but if you attempt to tailor a message to as a whole you will attract very little people. It’s almost impossible. Not even the best copywriter or marketer can achieve this.
However, if you break your message into groups of people of different background and interests then the picture begins open up. So using the sport Jiu-jitsu you have to ask what story is each group telling themselves and seeking to resolve.
Men often fantasize crazy scenarios about self-defense. Wild scenarios such as fighting many attackers at once, asking themselves how to defend their families from intruders, or fending off an attack from a wild animal with their bare hands. It’s ingrained into their DNA to be protectors.Women might find martial arts with inspiration. To become someone stronger than they were always led to believe. To become fearless of the world around them, never to be seen as prey or to be underestimated in an uncertain world.
To a parent, martial arts might represent something harmful to their kids – a sort of horse play making kids more aggressive. But if you present the sport as an anti-bullying, confidence boosting package then their eyes light up with attention. After all, no one wants their children bullied. And no one wants to be seen as defenseless nor feel incapable and hopeless. So no one buys jiu-jitsu, they buy a transformation. The story each group tells in their heads as to WHY they play the game is different.
Each group is buying the same product (jiu-jitsu) – but for different reasons, each expecting different results. The only way to achieve this is to tell a different story to each individual. A story that takes into account the story that’s playing in their head. Failure to communicate this idea to one group, and you risk alienating the others. But knowing who you’re talking to, and how to segment your message, and you can sell to them all. Which is what often happens when people attempt to sell a product or service. They write about their solution almost for themselves, being a little too close to their own picture and failing to recognize their audience isn’t even on step 1.
With data insights and marketing awareness, the scope is narrowed I’ve previously written about dead full time jobs to problem aware groups to caution them about the perils of business ownership before taking the leap.
I’ve written courses to make users sticky for a SaaS application that had a fast 7 day free trial.
Another course was the mistakes of not using translation software services for internationally marketed software.
Now that you have a sample of where to get ideas and who to write for, it’s time for you to find your main topic.
Further reading
This post is a sub topic to our key premise which is people do not care about the solution unless they understand the problem. It’s further detailed here to fully understand why educational content is key for a successful business.