Gauging the success of your newsletter
Gauging your success
BY: OWEN WILLIAMS
There are four important metrics you need to know about when it comes to figuring out how well your newsletter is doing.
Subscribers
Kind of an obvious one; this is how many people actually signed up and receive your newsletter. A good one to keep an eye on.
Open rate
The percentage of people from your subscriber base that actually open your newsletter. There’s varying opinions on what kind of open rate is good, but my opinion is you should be shooting for at least a consistent 50 percent, otherwise your list is dying or may be getting stale.
Click rate
The percentage of people who click a link in your email newsletter. This only begins mattering if you start talking to sponsors for your newsletter, but gives you a good idea of if people are actually clicking on what you send out. Apparently the industry average for this is something like 2 percent.
Unsubscribers
Don’t get yourself too down about this, but do keep an eye on it. Most email sending systems offer unsubscribers a box to share why they’re unsubscribing, which is a good insight into what you’re doing right or wrong.
It can hurt the first few times someone unsubscribes and feels personal, but remember that it’s not and that in that person’s shoes they might not have enough time to read your email.
Getting feedback
Here’s a warning for you: it’ll often feel like nobody cares or you have no idea if it’s effective or not. That’s the nature of email! There are no comments or ways to gauge just how it’s going outside of those cold numbers we talked about above, but there is a solid way to get people’s insight: just ask for replies.
Most of the time, people will just read your email and move on, but if you make it clear that people can simply reply to your newsletter to reach you, often you’ll receive useful feedback from readers.
BY: OWEN WILLIAMS