Newsletter 102: Metrics Cheat Sheet

Last month, I wrote an intro post all about how to create an impactful newsletter from scratch, focusing on how to write content people want to read and how to gain loyal subscribers. As I mentioned then, email marketing is one of the best tools in spreading the word about your brand in today’s digital-only era, but competition for airtime in people’s inboxes is higher than ever.

With that in mind, I’m continuing my lessons learned from writing and scaling the Work-Bench Enterprise Weekly Newsletter. This post will focus on how to analyze your newsletter’s metrics to determine what resonates with audience, but also, what doesn’t.

While content creators and marketers have their own preferences, tool kits and tech stack, here are my favorite metrics to measure to determine how successful my newsletter campaigns really are:

The Holy Grail: Growth Rate

A newsletter’s growth rate is the rate at which your subscriber list has increased (or decreased) over time. What many people don’t realize is that if your list isn’t growing, it’s actually dying. This is because all email marketing list’s have a natural decay that expires around 22.5%. Not only do people unsubscribe on their own, but they also leave their companies and switch email addresses pretty frequently. So, it’s important to pay attention to this number and make sure you keep it at a healthy size and increasing rate.

When you first launch your newsletter, this growth rate may be slow to start (given it will likely consist of friends, family, and customers). But generally speaking, your unsubscribe rate should hover around the average of 0.1–0.2%. Pending how large your subscriber list is, this can vary from a couple to dozens of unsubscribes per email campaign. Meaning if you send out one email per week, you need to gain that amount of subscribers or more per week to sustain positive growth.

Open & Click Through Rate

Open and click through rate are also important metrics to track, as they give you direct insight into how many people on your subscriber list are actually engaging with your content.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

How I wrap my head around the importance of engagement vs. the size of the subscriber list is similar:“If you send out an email and no one reads it, did you really send it?”

On average, email open rates waver around 21% with click through rates around 2.6% (pending your industry). The three biggest areas to rethink if your open rate is dipping much below this average is:

• Your subject line: Is it too long? Are you using unnecessary buzzwords? Does it look like a spam email? Does it properly convey the emails value proposition?
• Your email cadence: Are you sending multiple emails that could be consolidated into one?
• Your audience segmentation: Are you blasting your entire subscriber list when the content only pertains to a small subset? Are you personalizing the emails?

Best Performing Content: Click through rates also help dig up what content is performing the best. Are your data reports getting significantly more clicks than your playbooks? Are your afternoon events getting more clicks than your morning events? Over time, this will reveal trends of what people are most interested in reading and if possible, this is where you should double down.

Active vs. Inactive Engagement

Similar to open and click through rate, looking at your active vs. inactive engagement will give you a better understanding of how many people are actually engaging with your content.

• Active subscriber = Someone who regularly opens and engages with your emails and content. They may not open every single email you send, but they generally show interest.
• Inactive subscriber = Someone who hasn’t opened and engaged with your content in a long time. Whether these subscribers are on a temporary hiatus or are permanently ghosting you, either way, they’re not benefiting from your email or brand in any way.

So what do we do about inactive subscribers? Some marketers advocate to completely remove them from your subscriber list in order to keep a clean, active, and healthy list. Others advocate to keep them…because after all…a subscriber is a subscriber.

It costs about 5x as much to acquire a new subscriber than it does to keep and re-engage an existing one. So, it seems the best method may be to meet in the middle — try to re-engage these inactive subscribers. Once you’ve taken the time to audit your subscriber list and properly identify who your inactive subscribers are, you want to send them a re-engagement email to test whether or not they’re truly gone forever. “We miss you,” “We haven’t seen you in a while,” discounts, or a super short survey on what they’d like to see most are very common ways to reach out a final time. If you have the budget, targeting these people with social media ads can also be an effective method to lead them back to your brand.

Reader Feedback

While metrics are great, don’t be afraid to ask your audience for feedback directly. Once a year, send out a survey asking what content they like the most, what they want to see more of, what they could do without, etc. to reset your expectations and see how they’ve matured over the year. Just make sure the survey is short and easy to fill out — people are busy.

Also don’t discount inbound feedback. You’ll know when an email knocks it out of the park. You’ll get responses like “this is great” and “thanks so much for sending.” While these are hard to quantify, keep track of them.

Pro Tip: Segment Your Email Lists

I’ll end this post with one piece of advice. For any brand, your audience will have certain segmentations. When you’re first getting your newsletter off of the ground, you’ll likely have one master distribution list. This is where you’ll send all of your content. But as your newsletter matures, your content and audience will too. At this point, your audiences will have signed up to your newsletter for different reasons. It’s your job to segment them according to that reason, so that they’re only getting targeted with your content that pertains directly to them.

Here’s a list of possible segments to consider:

• Different stakeholders (customers, potential customers, investors, corporates, startups, etc.)
• Geographies
• Those who signed up for events
• Those who downloaded a specific piece of gated content