Email Newsletter Metrics You Need to be Keeping Abreast Of
If you're running an email newsletter, then you clearly are serious about communicating with your customers and prospects. Nevertheless, you should constantly be checking that newsletter's performance, or all of your efforts may not produce.
Let's examine some email newsletter metrics and how you should understand them.
Newsletter metrics you need to monitor
- Track your clicks and especially conversions – We assume you're doing this work for a good reason, so it's crucial to know how many of your readers are clicking and converting, no matter what you're your conversion goals are. This is your money stat.
- Monitor your bounce rates – A bounce rate is simply the number of emails that aren't successfully delivered. You can have a “hard” bounce, which is when you have a bad address, or a “soft bounce”, where the inbox may be full or unavailable, or possibly a server issue. Your email provider will quickly let you know when your bounce rates are too high.
- Check your open rates – While not as vital as some of the other email newsletter metrics, purely by virtue of the fact that there's really no way to get a “real” accurate number due to image loads, it's still worth utilizing this as a guideline. An average email open rate is usually in the range of 15-20 percent, depending on the industry and the type of email.
- Low delivery rates and high spam complaints – Your email delivery rate should not be any less than 95 percent, and if that's not the case, there could be a problem with dead addresses, or even your email provider. As far as spam goes, if you are getting more than 1 percent of spam complaints, you'll very likely be sidelined by your email provider, as they take this very seriously.
- Keep an eye on unsubscribes – It's normal to have people unsubscribe from your lists once in a while and for any number of good and bad reasons. What you need to know is that a typical unsubscribe rate is less than 1 percent, and if you're anywhere near 5 percent, you want to find out why. Your messages may have slipped off point, or here's a topical one; your emails aren't optimized for mobile! Since now half of all email is read on mobile, you have to make sure of this one.
