I have used and love behavioral analytics tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Heap, and Pendo. They’re life-savers if you’re a product manager, marketer, designer, analyst, or engineer focused on improving the product experience. If I was dropped into any company’s product management team, it would be one of my initial asks: point me to your data system and let me understand your metrics. Last year as I was helping to launch an email newsletter, I wanted to leverage the same type of analyses I did for products, but for email. I spoke with a couple of experts in the email industry to get ready to understand what to measure, and they told me to:
- Monitor my engagement metrics by email provider
- Remove non-engaging contacts from our email distribution list
- Monitor my long term retention of cohorts of contacts
These felt like classic behavioral analytic problems in the product space, but email focused. I assumed that somebody was enabling this kind of analysis for the email, space, right?
Nope. I worked at HubSpot for five years, and I have so much respect for that product team. They’re badass, plain and simple (crazy smart, humble, and get stuff done). They built some simple features to answer some of these questions, but don’t provide retention across all of your email campaigns. Does mailchimp offer anything like this? Nope. What about AutoPilot, the company we were using when I joined Reforge? Nope. I did a quick search and I didn’t find any company that provides this type of feature.
One of the core things we teach at Reforge is that retention is king – it makes or breaks your company (acquisition, monetization, payback period, competitive advantage). So I set out to measure it.
It was pretty simple, once I got the pieces working together:
- I turned on the AutoPilot source in Segment, and piped the data to our data warehouse. Luckily we’re not Amazon, so a simple postgres database easily housed the data for this new product.
- I turned on the Sendgrid source in Sendgrid, then spent weeks going back with Segment’s support department figuring out how to properly configure webhooks so email activity data flowed into our data warehouse.
- I wrote a Jupyter notebook that bucketed contacts into their weekly subscriber cohorts and then built retention heatmaps based on the email activity data from both our email marketing system and our transactional emails.
- I ran a script that queried DNS for a domain’s email provider so I could segment the retention curves by email provider (g-suite, microsoft, aol, yahoo, etc).
The outputs looked like this (non-segmented charts):


This helped us to answer key questions like:
- What percentage of our subscriber cohorts were active N weeks after they subscribed?
- Did we have a sticky email newsletter? Did people still around long term?
- Would we be able to sustainably grow our subscriber base over time, if we were able to keep acquisition constant / grow it over time?
- How did our retention curves look by email provider?
- Who were our most prolific consumers (forwarding emails to others, consuming regularly, etc)?
- Who should we be removing from our distribution lists (so that the email providers weren’t hurting our sender and reputation scores)?
It made me ask myself, why don’t email companies provide this kind of functionality? Some thoughts:
- Mailchimp, HubSpot, and companies like it are focused on all of the other aspects of email: helping people design emails, setup automation, and measure individual campaign performance. The bigger problem is not having enough contacts to email in the first place, not having a well designed email, or wanting to analyze a single campaign rather than look at the health of an entire contact database.
- Cohort analysis is not something many people find intuitive, and is a relatively advanced topic. There are still many product teams that don’t measure it, and I expect it’ll come to marketing tools eventually.
- This is a big company problem, and they’ll end up writing custom software to solve it for themselves. For everyone else, this isn’t a must have.
Is there some easier way to do this? Is there a company that enables this? Let me know, I’d love to use their less-buggy code. I am trying to clean up the code so it’s half respectable and will try to post when I can.
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