New goal unlocked 🔓
Bidding vanity metrics adieu
I know I’m not the only person who’s been lured by the siren song of vanity metrics.
I hear it in client coaching sessions and in conversations with creatives. We seek numbers that sound impressive but mean very little.
Audience size has historically been my vanity metric Achilles’ heel. I’ve craved more Instagram followers, more TikTok followers, more newsletter subscribers because that would mean I’d made it.
Or, if I’m being 100% truthful, it would mean that other people would think I’d made it.
That’s why we call them vanity metrics. They’re more about aesthetics than utility.
Your job is to figure out what metrics actually matter for your business, your priorities, and your values.
Inner Workout has effectively been off Instagram since October. The platform is having a quarter-life crisis, and I wasn’t seeing an ROI on the time and money we put into our presence there.
Plus, it felt misaligned to be regularly posting content on a platform that was such a time suck when the most common feedback we get from community members is that they don’t feel like they have time for self-care.
I felt comfortable pulling back from Instagram because our newsletter has always been our biggest traffic driver anyway. However, there was still some vanity metric residue in the way I looked at the newsletter. For so long, I’d focused on growing that subscriber number to be as big as it possibly could be. That’s vanity. Utility is looking at how many people actually read the newsletter.
We were hovering around 30% open rate. Above most industry averages, but not jaw-dropping by any means. Until I did something I’d been avoiding for years. I cleaned out our list. We emailed everyone who hadn’t opened the newsletter in the last six months to let them know we’d be removing them from the list in a week unless they told us they wanted to stay.
All in, we deleted over 1,000 subscribers. Now our open rate consistently sits around 43%—double the average open rate for all industries. This list cleaning is now a quarterly practice for Inner Workout.
I’d rather have a smaller list that’s engaged with my emails than a larger list that only feeds my ego.
Turns out, my ego was also trying to run the show with my book launch stretch goal: make a bestseller list. There’s nothing inherently wrong with harboring a pipe dream of becoming a bestseller, but it took a conversation with my publicist, Megan, to show me that it wasn’t necessarily the only way.
She said something like, “Publishers love seeing that you can write a book that has legs.”
And I felt something open up within me. She’d unearthed a new goal, one that was less about ego-stroking and more about sustainable impact. I want to write books that have legs. Books that transcend a trend cycle. Books that you’ll return to for reference for years to come. Books that you’ll recommend to a friend long after the publicity campaign has ended.
New goal: unlocked. 🔓
Wanna work together? I have space to work with three business owners starting in January. I updated the page this week with a testimonial from my client, Kasia, that is far better than any sales copy I could write myself. If you’ve got some $$$ to burn in order to reduce your tax burden, this is a fruitful way to do it!
I’m pausing on book launch asks (besides pre-ordering the book!) while I get my ducks in a row. More to come in the new year.