Email Newsletter Analytics: Maximize Engagement
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There is ultimate truth in numbers. No matter what type of information you share in newsletters and email campaigns you’ll want to be sure they are performing and being well-received. Newsletter analytics are a surefire way to be able to track the success of your email communications.
We’re going to unveil what email analytics are important to consider, as well as how email analytics software makes it easy to do.
You spend valuable time creating and distributing email communications. If they aren’t being read or engaged with, then that time can feel like a waste. The only way to really know how recipients are engaging with your communications is by leveraging newsletter analytics.
Newsletter analytics will help you be able to prioritize your responsibilities, as well as help you know how to set up your newsletters in the most optimal way. In some cases, there’s going to be trial and error, but you can only try and improve upon what you know, which is what newsletter analytics brings to the mix.
Email builders also are a great way to set yourself up for success from the start. Email builders offer pre-built templates that are designed with best practices in mind to drive engagement and maximize your newsletter analytics, such as open rates and click-through rates.
Speaking of open rates and click-through rates, it’s time to focus on the best newsletter analytics to track.
Here’s a look at some of the most telling metrics to keep an eye on:
Spam and blacklisting tell you the percentage of delivered email messages that get marked as spam. Some email service providers will automatically flag your newsletters as spam or junk without placing it into a recipient’s inbox.
Individuals can also mark messages as spam themselves. It’s of great value to continuously clean out your newsletter subscriber list to take out any bounced or dead emails. Also, be sure that people opt-in and subscribe before you send mass communications their way.
An open rate is one of the most popular metrics in newsletter analytics and for good reason. It tells you the percent of subscribers that open your newsletter.
If your open rate is low, then you will have to adjust what you’re sending– you may want to adjust the subject lines, timing of your messages, “from”/sender name, or relevance of the message itself.
As a benchmark, the average open rate is 16.97%, but is also more granular per industry, so here’s an idea of what your benchmark should be.
The subscription rate shows you how many people sign up for your newsletter. The goal is to always grow this list so that you have more people to send your information, marketing, and newsletters to!
A few ways to help increase your subscriber rate is to offer a call-to-action for your current subscribers to recruit more, have a clear sign-up/subscribe button on your website, or offer a way for people to share your newsletter content via social media.
On the other end of the spectrum is the unsubscribe rate, which shows you how many people have chosen to opt-out of your newsletter communications.
Of course, you want this number to be low. To accomplish this, ensure that your subscribers have opted in and send out only relevant communications.
It’s one thing for subscribers to open your emails and glance at them, but it’s another for them to engage with it. A click through rate shows you how many subscribers actually click on links inside your newsletter.
Design and content have the most impact on your click through rate. With an email builder, you can easily set up a beautifully designed and branded newsletter using drag-and-drop functionality that’s built purposefully to drive engagement.
The read rate gives you an idea of how much time subscribers are spending to read your email newsletter. It’s a great metric that takes the open-rate to the next level as you can tell if readers are glancing, skimming, or actually spending time reading through your newsletter.
Email communications can be shared through social media, email, and other integrated apps. The sharing metric allows you to understand how much people are enjoying your communications and how engaged they are to want to share it out.
You can be proactive and incentivize readers to share your newsletter by offering regards to subscribers who do spread the word.
The bounce rate is the percentage of email addresses in your subscriber list that didn’t receive the email because it was returned by the mail server. This could happen if the email address or domain doesn’t exist, if the email server blocked delivery, if a mailbox is full, or if the email message is too large.
An email conversion rate is the percentage of subscribers who fulfill an action after having read your email. The formula for conversion rates = clicks/actions.
For example, if you have a call-to-action for your reader to sign up for a contest or complete a purchase, then the conversion would mean that they completed said action after being directed from your email newsletter.
With all the newsletter analytics out there to track, how do you measure your own newsletter’s performance? Well, the answer really depends on your business goals.
Are you looking to improve brand awareness or brand loyalty? Do you wish to boost sales from your marketing communications? The way you measure and track your analytics depends on what your ultimate goals are.
For example, for retail businesses, the conversion rate is going to be a tell-tale sign of success. For internal communications, a read rate is important to measure because you want to be sure your employees are tuned into what you’re sending out.
Newsletter engagement is the ultimate measure of performance because it’s easy to open an email, but it takes commitment and interest to spend time and interact with it.
Newsletter engagement can be tracked using the right newsletter analytics. With email builder software that’s equipped with newsletter analytics, measuring engagement is as easy as reviewing the metrics that get delivered your way after you hit send.
Did you know you can use Google Analytics to track traffic to your website from your newsletter? If your email contains any links to your website, you can see how many sales are generated from your marketing communications using this data.
While it’s very useful to have this information, you can easily get this data by using an email builder rather than having to set up metrics across different platforms. That being said, we’re going to share how you can do it if you still wish to know.
If you wish to create trackable URLs in your email newsletter through Google Analytics, you can do so by adding special URLs for every call-to-action you wish to follow.
You’d need to add a UTM code. You can do so manually by starting with the regular URL and then:
Sounds a bit tricky, doesn’t it? This time-consuming way to track your URLs isn’t necessary. With an email builder, all you’d have to do is copy/paste the original URL into your newsletter.
The email builder will provide you with the analytics you wish to track automatically.
Should you still choose to go down the Google Analytics route, then you’ll want to know where you can find your metrics once you’ve done all the work.
Sign into your Google Analytics account.
Then, head over to: Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition
From this dashboard, you can see the breakdown of how people have been directed to your website, whether it be from direct, organic search, paid search, or your emails. To find the “email” rate, you can search “email” in the bar and filter for traffic driven from email.
To take it a level deeper, you can also see how your conversions have landed from your email marketing.
This is really valuable, especially if you’re trying to track sales from your email newsletters. Or, you can also use this to see if recipients filled out a form or took any other action from your email.
To track conversions with Google Analytics, you’ll need the aid of a third-party add on for these deeper metrics. You can set it up with integrations using Addons.
You can send thousands of emails, but if you don’t know who is reading them or engaging with them, what’s the point at the end of the day? Newsletter analytics take the guesswork out of the equation and show you exactly how your email performs when it reaches the inbox of your recipients.
With an email builder equipped with newsletter analytics, you gain all the information you need to know just by hitting send. You get to save time and have the exact insights you need to constantly improve upon your campaigns’ effectiveness and enagement.
