Notifications as an invitation to explore

I'm not one to get overly analytical around data. I've always felt that bigger companies had the luxury to spend the time on those things, not us Indiepedents.

I do often dip into web analytics, but nothing in great detail, and definitely not with consistency.

One thing that I always check, without fail, are notifications coming in. I love a good “new email subscriber” notification, and of course, “new sales” notifications are the icing on the cake.

I see notifications as an opportunity to be curious about the stories behind the actions.

Whereas with something like web analytics, it's aggregated data – you don't see the individual behind it. But with notifications, it's an opportunity to have a peek and explore who the person is and why they may have acted upon something.

Depending on the notification, you can get access to different kinds of information. With my Ghost website on Rosieland, when someone signs up, it also says the source of where they sign up from. I like to check that out and see if anyone or any website is referring new people. That, to me, is normally the quickest way to find out of new inbound links or referrals.

There are also money notifications that we have coming in. And when we are community-focused as a business,we have many continous touchpoints and engagement activity. These data points can really give us insight into our people's buyer journey, with a focus of trying to understand what it is that triggered them to buy at a certain point in time.

The reality is it's always going to be different for every customer, but if we can start to build up a picture of who is buying what, if I can check out their profile, their account, see how long they've been a subscriber, a free subscriber. I could check out their LinkedIn profile, see what their background is or how much experience they have. I could even choose to reach out. All of these things, even if I don't specifically write it down or track every single point, applying curiosity helps me to personally understand and start to make sense of all the connecting data points.

It’s not about looking at all the data, it’s about appreciating the individual stories and how they can matter.

It's also not only about what's happening around the person who's taken action that causes that notification. It's also around the idea that if a notification comes in, then I'll be aware of other activities that are happening within the business that may have resulted in that event happening.

For example, if we've just sent out a marketing email and we get a flurry of notifications, we know why the majority of these notifications came in. It's still an invitation to explore with the added context that these likely came from some marketing activity we did. We can tie those two (or more) things together and be curious about the impact it makes.

As founders, we love talking about spikes, graphs and data. I’d personally love to see more discussion on the story front. The people behind these actions. The real motivations behind the actions. And to then know that we can take action in a way that feels good for all of us.