The analytics that we sent over email used to be sloppy & weird. As a result, we redesigned them. This is only the first iteration. Please give us feedback on them.
That’s the summary. Here is the long answer!
The analytics that we sent over email used to be sloppy & weird
Right now, Buttondown's authors get data in a few places:
- In a dedicated analytics section on the app
- In an individual email view, after the email has been sent
- Over email, in the form of weekly & monthly digests
In the long run, we'd like our analytics to look & perform better in all of these places. We decided to start with overhauling our emails, since that allows us to start small & figure out a few first principles most easily.
We decided to begin with a small research project to figure out what you need and how we currently fall short. I talked to 10 Buttondown authors over the course of a month to figure it out. As a customer myself, I also have opinions – but mine are specific to my own needs, and Buttondown has a lot of varying use cases.
I learned a lot! For example:
- Some people send emails daily, others monthly, others sporadically.
- Some people check their analytics exclusively through our email digests, others on our website.
- Some people have automations turned on.
- Or paid subscriptions.
- Or they get lots of comments with everything they send.
- Some people have lists of <100 readers. Others are >100,000.
- Lists will go dormant for periods of time: vacation, hiatus, etc.
Analytics need to address all of these cases, in any permutation you can think of. We ended up building out a corpus of relevant scenarios and edge cases, a (very heavily truncated and simplified) version of which you can see below:
As a result, we redesigned them
From our interviews, we learned what matters to people:
- Larger lists care a lot about growth & engagement.
- Smaller lists care a lot about how a given email did.
- Everybody wants to know how emails did relative to their norm. Did this one do numbers? Great, let’s write more of that.
And so I tried to follow the Tuftean principle of clarifying by adding detail. We offer a bunch of side quest-y additions to analytics based on what features you have turned on, which will hopefully not overwhelm you with data or bore you with blank states. We try to put our numbers in context, showing you how your growth is doing or how your email fared relative to the baseline of your list.
We’re also trying to send you as a few emails as possible, because everybody gets too many emails. We want you to actually get value from what we’re showing you, and we want to be careful about when we’re showing it.
This is only the first iteration
Next, I’m going to work on a more general design system for all of our analytics across both web & email. Expect a few improvements & adaptations as we incorporate that system into our existing work.
In the long run, we’re hoping to improve our web analytics as well – but we wanted to start with email since it’s a little easier to do and it gives us a fast way to validate our thinking before we tackle the larger project.
Please give us feedback on them
Again, we’re new to reworking these, and we know that there are many different use cases. If something looks off, please let us know. If you’re looking for specific numbers that we’re not yet showing you, let us know that, too.
We’d be grateful for your input, as we’re only getting started here and we know there’s room to continue improving this.