Inbox Collective reposted this
Believe it or not, we're beginning Q3 — and there's no better time to check in on your email strategy. Opens and clicks tell you whether you're trending up or down, but they don't necessarily tell what's going wrong — or what to do instead. So evaluate your email strategy with these metrics from Dan Oshinsky of Inbox Collective:
Open rate and click rate aren’t the only ways to tell if your newsletter is successful. Here are 8 ways to measure success that aren’t the usual metrics: ❶ Active list size — What percentage of your list has engaged with an email in the last 90 days? List growth only matters if those new readers are opening and clicking. ❷ Net Promoter Score — Not enough newsletters measure feedback as one of their core metrics. So the next time you run a survey, try asking the Net Promoter Score question, which follows the format: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our newsletter to a friend or colleague?” The results should give you a decent sense of reader satisfaction, and you can compare your results to those from previous surveys to understand if you’re improving your newsletter over time. ❸ Customer acquisition cost — If you spend money to grow your email list, be sure to closely track customer acquisition cost, or CAC. This measures the cost to acquire one newsletter subscriber. So, let’s say you spend $1,000 on a series of ads and bring in 500 new subscribers. Divide the cost of the campaign ($1,000) by the number of subscribers (500), and you’ll get the CAC — in this case, $2. (For most newsletters, a CAC in the $1-3 range is normal.) ❹ Payback period — Let’s say it costs $2 to acquire a newsletter subscriber. Payback period looks at that CAC, as well as the estimated lifetime value of a subscriber to show you how long it will take to make your money back on that one new subscriber. (beehiiv’s Newsletter Navigator tool is great for calculating CAC and payback period —> https://lnkd.in/ePyWqST7) ❺ Spam complaint rate — Use Google Postmaster to track the percentage of Gmail readers who mark your email as spam. Gmail says you should always be below a 0.1% spam complaint rate, and a 0.3% rate is a massive red flag. If readers are marking your emails as spam, it means you’ve got to fix your growth or content strategy (or possibly both!). ❻ Time on site from newsletters — If your content is super long, it's not enough to see that readers clicked through. The real question is: Did they spend time on site actually reading your content? (For my newsletter, if I see readers spending less than three minutes on average on a story, I know I’ve missed the mark.) ❼ Reactivation rate — As the number of inactive readers on your list grows, it’s wise to run a reactivation campaign to win back these readers. The first time you run a campaign, anything between a 2-5% reactivation rate would be considered a success. I’ve found that at best-in-class newsletters, you might see a reactivation rate of anywhere between 5-15%. ❽ Reply rate to your welcome email — Ask something specific in your welcome email, then calculate how many readers reply. Those early replies often help with deliverability — and can help you better understand your audience, too!