Want to Gauge Your Email Newsletter’s Effectiveness? Here’s Some Metrics to Use

You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to build a visually attractive, content-rich email newsletter that’s your pride and joy. So, how’s that helping you?

There are several email metrics that apply directly to this, and keeping track of them will provide you with a leg up when you’re tweaking and optimizing for better results. Let’s examine some of these 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 imperative 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 merely the number of emails that aren’t successfully delivered. You could 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 maybe a server issue. Your email provider will quickly let you know when your bounce rates are too high.
• Check your open rates – Although not as vital as some of the other metrics, purely by virtue of the fact that there’s really no way to get a “real” accurate number because of image loads, it’s still worth using this as a guideline. An average email open rate is usually in the range of 15-20 percent, dependant upon the industry and the type of email.
• Low delivery rates and high spam complaints – Your email delivery rate should be no less than 95 percent, and if that’s not the case, there might be a problem with dead addresses, or maybe 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, because they take this very seriously.
• Keep a watchful eye on unsubscribes – It’s normal to have people unsubscribe from your lists occasionally and for any number of good and bad reasons. What you should know is that a typical unsubscribe rate is less than 1 percent, and if you’re anywhere near 5 percent, you need to find out why. Your messages may have slipped off purpose, or here’s a topical one; your emails aren’t optimized for mobile! Since now half of all email is read on mobile, you need to make certain of this one.