Six Email Metrics That Matter (That Aren’t Open Rate)
Tags: Newsletter Experts, Newsletter, Metrics, Journalism, Publishing

Think of your newsletters as a car. Actually, let’s be more specific: Think of it as your first car. Mine was an Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight, handed down from my grandpa when I turned 16.

The Eighty-Eight was a great first car: Bench seating in the front and back, with room to fit six; a cloth interior you practically sunk into; and a trunk bigger than my first New York City apartment. The Eighty-Eight was nearly indestructible, which made it perfect for an idiot teenager like me.

And in a way, that car was a lot like email: a weird, unsexy, very old piece of technology that did its job surprisingly well — except when it didn’t.

Using open rate as your only metric for success would be like driving that Eighty-Eight and caring only whether or not there was gas in the tank. It’s an old car — you have to pay attention to everything! How’s the tread on the tires? Does the oil need changing? Is the engine running OK? Have you changed the spark plugs recently? You get the idea. Your newsletters work the same way. As long as you’re keeping an eye on the entire email program — content strategy, engagement, growth, deliverability, onboarding, etc. — you’re going to be able to keep things running smoothly for a long while. But if you let one thing go wrong, other problems may arise.

Way-too-long car anecdotes aside, here are six metrics you might want to monitor:

1.) Monthly list growth — Are you pitching your newsletters correctly? Do readers understand why they’d want to sign up for your newsletter? Have you created enough new ways to capture email signups? Keeping an eye on monthly list growth is an easy way to tell that your branding and your acquisition efforts are working.

2) Click-to-open rate — There are a few ways to measure engagement on a newsletter, but this is my favorite. Simply: If 100 people opened my email, how many of them clicked on at least one link? If your product is designed to drive people to your site, this will help you measure whether or not your readers are finding content that they want to engage more deeply with.

3) The percentage of readers who open 50% of newsletters per month — I’m saying 50% here, but it’s really up to you to figure out what the bar is. Maybe you’re defining your most highly-engaged fans as anyone opening half of your emails in a given month. Maybe it’s higher — 60/70/80%. Whatever it is, this metric can help you see what percentage of your readers are making a habit of opening your emails. And those habits matter, particularly if you’re working on newsletters for a news organization. One new study found that building habit is key to acquiring and retaining subscribers.

4) Engaged minutes per newsletter — If your focus is on driving readers back to your site, and making sure that they’re actually spending time on site, you should keep tabs on engaged minutes driven per newsletter. For those working in newsrooms on tools like Chartbeat or Parse.ly, reach out to your contacts there for help setting up a dashboard. If you’re on Google Analytics, I recommend using this newsletter dashboard, which has engaged minutes built in. (GA isn’t always great at calculating total read time, so I prefer to use Average Session Duration instead.) If you have multiple newsletters, you can create multiple versions of that dashboard, broken out by the specific email.

5) Mobile open rates — Here’s another metric that’s already built into that GA dashboard. Remember: The majority of email use takes place on a mobile device. If your audience is primarily reading on a desktop, it could be a sign that you need to redesign your newsletters for a mobile audience — or even rethink your newsletter to be more mobile friendly.

6) Clicks/1000 — This is one of my favorite metrics for predicting the future success of a newsletter. It measures the amount of traffic you’re driving per 1,000 emails sent. Here’s how to calculate it: (Total clicks / Emails delivered) x 1000. Once you have that number, you can start to see the potential impact of your newsletters as you grow. Let’s say you have a thousand subscribers, and you’re driving 100 clicks per 1,000 emails sent. At the moment, that means your newsletter’s only driving 100 clicks per send. But as you grow your list to 10,000 readers, you’d be driving 1,000 clicks at that rate. At 50k readers, you’re driving 5,000 clicks, and at 250k readers, you’re driving 25,000 clicks, and so on. If you have a high clicks/1000 number, that may be a sign that you’ve got a product you should focus on growing, since it might produce significant traffic returns in the long run.

But I don’t want to dismiss open rate entirely — it can be a useful tool for measuring the health of your email program! If you’re running A/B tests, open rate can be a valuable metric for picking out a winner. If you’re launching a new newsletter and the open rates are poor out of the gate, that might be a sign that the product isn’t actually connecting with readers. (On the other hand: If you’re rebranding a product and the open rates spike upwards, that’d be an excellent indicator that you should continue onward.) If a specific newsletter suddenly sees a huge drop in open rates, that could be a clear warning sign of upcoming trouble. And if your open rates are strong but your deliverability is poor, that’s a sign that there’s probably something wrong behind the scenes with your ESP or your list management strategy. Open rate is the “check engine” light of email metrics. It won’t tell you what’s wrong or what action to take next, but it’s a sign that you need to start digging into the data for more answers.

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This post is part of a series on secrets by newsletter experts. You might also want to check out: