Focus on Four Key Metrics
In the graph below, I'm showing four key metrics we focus on and compare when measuring the performance of our newsletter on a month-to-month basis: the number of new subscribers (shown in blue), the number of subscribers that activate our tracker (shown in orange), the number of people who unsubscribe (shown in gray), and the total subscriber count (shown in green).
(If you'd like to see the graph at full size, click it to open a larger version in a new window or tab.)
In general, our subscriber base is growing at a pretty healthy rate. In the last six months, we've added 450 subscribers, which is an average of 75 per month, or 2.5 per day! We can attribute at least part of this success to the newsletter sign-up CTA that is just about everywhere on our site, but the spike we tend to see of new subscribers on the day we publish a newsletter suggests to me that our emails are often forwarded to people who are not yet subscribers, but end up signing up after reading the email. So in addition to remaining a great alert tool, the emails are also allowing our subscribers to promote us simply by forwarding our messages to others.
As you can see from the graph above, we lose very few readers. We did notice a spike of unsubscribers in January (10), which made me wonder if that was either the result of December's newsletter being generally uninteresting (impossible, it had Tony Stark in it), or maybe just a matter of some people finally unsubscribing who had been meaning to for a while; the new year will bring about that kind of behavior. In any case, losing ten subscribers only seems like a lot when we're used to that number being closer to zero for most months. That said, I do think that reader retention is a challenge. How do we do this? I think it really comes down to making sure that your content is consistently worthwhile. If you haven't already, read last month's newsletter, How to Write a Newsletter, for more information on writing compelling content.
You'll notice that the tracking numbers are pretty varied over the last six months. I've been interested in what factors might contribute to the number of tracked clickthroughs being higher or lower, whether it be affected by the subject of the newsletter or the day and time we send the email. At this point, I'm still not sure, though I would say that I'm generally pleased if the numbers stay around a 10% clickthrough rate. Over the last seven months, we've averaged an 8% clickthrough rate, which was driven down by our October newsletter about online reptuation management that received only 106 clickthroughs out of the 1943 subscribers that received our email (5%). In an earlier blog post about our newsletter tracker stats, I speculated that since this subject isn't exactly a hot topic, and the term 'reputation management' was still a bit obscure, it made sense that this particular newsletter wouldn't have drawn much attention. However, we also made the mistake of sending the email on a Friday. On Halloween. At 7:45 in the morning. Not smart. It would have been better to wait until the first few days of November rather than send it when we did. All that aside, I also want to make sure that the tracking numbers are trending upward in proportion to the growing number of subscribers. If the subscriber list is growing, but the tracker numbers are flat, that would actually represent a decline. In our case, you can see that the highs and lows are trending upward, which is good to see.
Why does the tracker data end earlier than the other three metrics?
Ira,
Good question- I probably should have mentioned this in my explanation of the graph. We send out our newsletters at the end of every month (we sent out our April newsletter yesterday). So, at the time when I wrote April's newsletter, we had no tracking data for April. Now that we've sent out the newsletter, though, the tracking data is coming in.
Chris
Chris, Thanks for sharing all this data. Do you have a longer range of data for your newsletter tracking? I'm interested in speculating the reasons the numbers vary so widely.
Last month you wrote a bit about the time it could/should take to write. How much time do you spend reviewing your tracking, analytics and SEO for your newsletters?
Alex,
It varies depending upon what I'm looking for in particular. I almost always keep our CMS tracking report open in a tab of my browser, so I can quickly check it after I receive a tracker alert via email. I also keep Google Analytics open and tend to spend about 15 minutes a day reviewing the data in general every day. If I were to combine the amount of time I spent analyzing data related to a newsletter after I send it out, which would include looking at the tracker, Google Analytics, our Google tracking data, and making any adjustments for SEO, it would probably amount to 2-3 hours per newsletter.
Hope that answers your question,
Chris
Is it really that impressive that your newsletter content pages represent 8 out of your top 20 pages? Makes sense to me since they are probably the most often updated kind of content- every month, right- and are pretty long?
They are in the top 20 because their meta titles are corresponding well to keywords and phrases that are being searched often. Also, the newsletters are added once a month, but we update our blog much more frequently- some months as often as once a day!
What you can't see in the screenshot I pulled from our Google Analytics account is that it also shows that 2,224 pages were viewed a total of 46,755 times on our site this month. Of those 2,224 pages, the top 20 are the ones listed in the screenshot. Of those 20, 8 are related to our newsletter. From that perspective, it is a significant statistic. What does make sense, in general, is that the content we value most highly, and create most carefully and strategically, would be so often among the top pages. That's a SEO pay-off of our effort, though, which, in my opinion, is impressive!
Once again, so much to take in! You guys always have the neatest graphs. How do you make them?
What do you do with the email addresses that you're tracking? Do you have a privacy policy on your newsletter?
This is a great follow-up to last month's piece about newsletter writing, though I guess it could have just as easily been about writing- in general. Will you be doing more about marketing rather than web development? How do you all divvy up your company resources between development, design and marketing? Are you guys heading more in the marketing direction- if so, that's smart. It's the future of this industry. If you can't design and do marketing, you won't last.
@Andrew, Thanks! Most of the time, if I know I need to plot something out in a graph, I'll draw it first and then create the final image using Photoshop. I posted some graphs and the original drawings on my blog last month after a commenter asked a similar question. @Alex asked if I run some kind of script to collect and visualize this data. Sadly, my approach is much more old-fashioned and less sophisticated. I manually collect the data I'm looking for, sketch it out on paper, then create a graph using Photoshop, but there's no automated script or software plotting it out for me.
@Alex, We don't have a privacy policy on our newsletter, but we do nothing other than send them to our subscribers. We don't share the list with anyone, under any circumstances. We consider the tracking we do to be well within reasonable bounds since our readers willingly provide that information to us and the only usage we track is their use of our site. Internet privacy is something I care a lot about, so I'm definitely on-guard to make sure we don't do anything contrary to those values.
@Ryan Brown, Our next newsletters will definitely be about marketing, as are most of them. Specifically, we're planning newsletters on practical social media use, how to do webinars, and optimizing your website with calls to action. Each of these newsletters deal with marketing, but from the perspective of a web development firm. We partner with many marketing-focused agencies, and don't want to compromise that relationship. However, we do provide expertise as it pertains to marketing on the web. So, no, we're not heading in an entirely new direction. We're a web development firm that wants to make sure that the sites we build achieve the business objectives planned for them- including marketing.
@Chris Butler, yes, but you are tracking people. Isn't it true that the Google Analytics API restricts this kind of thing because of the very privacy issues that you claim to care about?
Ted,
You've got a fair question here. Google doesn't want their API being used to track individuals because all of that data goes through their system, so any sticky privacy issues around the practice of tracking user behavior and tying it to individual IP addresses or email addresses would become their problem too. In our case, we are simply tracking our newsletter subscribers' behavior on our site using a proprietary tracking tool that keeps the data on our private server. We would not even have those email addresses if the users did not willingly subscribe to our newsletter. The data we collect is only relevant to our site and never leaves our server, so it wouldn't present any real value to anyone other than us. Furthermore, any user that is concerned about this still can avoid it two ways: (1) by not clicking the 'read more' link in the newsletter email they receive from us, or (2) deleting their browser's cookies. As I mentioned above, internet privacy is something I care a lot about, and I feel that our tracking practices do not violate user privacy in any way.
Thanks for your concern about this, and for your comment.
Chris
It is quite difficult to manage newsletter campaign if you are not using right tools. Here I am talking about email marketing.
Some days back(before 2 years) I used a form in my website to capture emails of my visitors and I used to mail them from my Gmail. I used to put them in BCC and send. :) Looks crazy right.
Now I have learnt. I am using lot of newsletter managing software. So, what I want to tell is please learn about newsletter campaigns.
Maintaining a newsletter for my website subscriber is quite cumbersome. I face lot of problems. But this post gives me an insight of how this is handled by newfangled. May be I should checkout the pricing and try this.
It is quite difficult to manage newsletter campaign if you are not using right tools. Here I am talking about email marketing.
Some days back(before 2 years) I used a form in my website to capture emails of my visitors and I used to mail them from my Gmail. I used to put them in BCC and send. :) Looks crazy right.
Now I have learnt. I am using lot of newsletter managing software. So, what I want to tell is please learn about newsletter campaigns.