Immediately Start Identifying Your Buyers!

Subscriber engagement doesn't matter if you can't monetize them.

Author

Chris Miquel
October 01, 2024

I should’ve stayed home yesterday and got this email out instead of suffering through the agony of the Miami Dolphins’ putrid performance.

I wrapped up work early to head down to the Hard Rock Casino before the Monday Night football game between the Miami Dolphins and the Tennessee Titans.

Should’ve known what was to come after getting lambasted at the casino tables and losing a nice chunk of cash.

I parlayed that loss at the Casino with probably the worst performance I have ever seen by my beloved team.

We left at the start of the 4th quarter to take the miserable hour-long drive back to the house in complete disappointment.

If I had just stayed home I could’ve sent out this email yesterday like I was supposed to, saved a bunch of cash, and could have called it a night early, and got some extra sleep.

I apologize for letting you down and not getting this out yesterday, I’m sure it ruined your evening as much as mine was.

Enough of my rambling and let’s get to this week’s insight.

Who are the buyers on your list?

For email deliverability purposes it’s great to know who’s engaging with your content, but when it comes to subscriber acquisition you really need to know who’s creating revenue so you know which sources to push on.

You may say…

I don’t sell any products or services how am I supposed to identify a buyer?

If you're not selling a product or service, you most likely are promoting someone else’s product or service to generate revenue.

A lot of newsletter operators will promote affiliate offers to generate sales on a CPA (cost per acquisition) basis.

In these types of campaigns, you're able to identify who actually made the purchase if you properly provide the advertisers with the correct data.

You should always pass your unique Subscriber ID on any link to an offer!

No matter what ESP you are using to send out your emails, they all have a unique Subscriber ID associated with every subscriber on your list.

This is important, so you don’t have to pass the email address of the individual to the advertiser for tracking purposes, you can just send the subscriber ID instead.

The offer tracking link allows you to pass additional variables to help you identify what source of data is creating conversions.

All affiliate tracking links have similar formats which allow you to pass what are called additional sub-id variables to help you optimize your traffic.

Most tracking links allow you to pass up to 5 additional variables, but some allow for more variables and some less, but the key is to use these variables to identify who and where your buyers are coming from.

Here is a breakdown of how we use the sub-ids for tracking our performance:

  • Sub id 1: Source (Name of publication we use acronyms)

  • Sub id 2: Traffic Type / Medium (email, sms, advertorial, etc.)

  • Sub id 3: Creative (The creative used for the offer)

  • Sub id 4: Unique Subscriber ID

  • Sub id 5: Additional Variable (Anything else we may want to track)

By passing this data via the tracking link you will be able to identify what sources are performing best for you to generate revenue, and you will be able to identify down to the single subscriber who made purchases.

A great example of this was shared by Matt Paulson owner of MarketBeat on 𝕏 back on September 16th.

You can clearly see how he can identify exactly how much he generates from a source which allows him to make decisions on where to push on his subscriber acquisitions.

It’s also important to note that someone who has been identified as a buyer, has a higher chance of purchasing another product or service vs. subscribers that have not previously made a purchase.

Here is a quick cheat sheet of merge tags for popular ESPs to pass the unique subscriber ID within your links.

ESP

Subscriber ID Merge Tag

ActiveCampaign

%SUBSCRIBERID%

AWeber

{{ subscriber.id }}

Beehiiv

{{subscriber_id}}

Braze

{{${user_id}}}

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) 

{{ contact.CONTACT_ID }}

Campaigner

[Contact.contactId]

Drip

{{ subscriber.first_name }}

EmailOctopus

{{ID}}

GetResponse

{{CONTACT subscriber_id}}

Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) 

{{ contact.id }}

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) 

{{ customer.id }}

Klaviyo

{{ person.id }}

Mailchimp

*|UNIQID|*

Mailjet

{{mj:contact.ID}}

Omnisend

[[contact.id]]

Sendlane

{{ contact.id }}

DISCLAIMER: Always test whether the merge tags are working before deploying a live send to make sure there is no issue with the merge syntax.

I see your buyers do you? 👀

Chris Miquel
Co-Founder of SoVi Digital

Follow me on Twitter: @miqchris

and on LinkedIn: chrismiquel

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