4 Key Newsletter Metrics And What To Test For Each
Newsletters are powerful assets for content and product businesses, but how can you tell it is as effective as possible?
Content strategy takes significant effort and newsletters are no different. With all the work that goes into them, we want our readers to get as much value as possible out of them. The last thing any writer wants is to spend time on what they believe is valuable, only for readers to not open or unsubscribe.
Fortunately, there are 4 key metrics we can use to diagnose where to run some optimization tests.
Metric 1: Opt-In Rate
This is how many people subscribe to a newsletter divided by the total unique visitors to the website.
Opt-in is a way to measure how compelling the value proposition is for what the reader is going to get if they type in their email address. For low opt-in rates (usually from generic "join for news and updates" forms), try creating a compelling value proposition for what value the reader gets.
Metric 2: Open Rate
This is how many readers open the newsletter issue divided by the total people who received it from the email list.
Someone could have tens of thousands of emails on their list, but if only 100 people open the emails, it's still not effective. Open rate is all about how compelling the subject line is and whether the reader thinks it's worth their valuable time.
Metric 3: Click-Through Rate
This is how many people click a link in the email divided by the number of people who opened the email (don't divide by the total list).
Newsletters should be based on value to the reader, but occasionally nudging them toward a related product in the PS statement is a good strategy. If people are not clicking, they don't see how the product is related to the value or it is not compelling enough.
Metric 4: Unsubscribe Rate
The dreaded unsubscribe rate is how many people unsubscribed from an email list divided by the number of people who received that email.
Most writers cringe at unsubscribe rates believing that it should be difficult, but make unsubscribing easy and focus on the value. If the unsubscribe rate is high, there is a disconnect between what the reader thought they would be getting and what they did.
