Using Newsletter Analytics to Make Your Email Campaigns More Effective
For many busy professionals, email is their central tool for managing tasks and priorities. It acts as an information feed, not unlike the newsfeed on Facebook. Indeed, it is not uncommon to hear some computer users to claim to “live in Outlook.”
Getting your organization’s message into that stream of information gives you or your ideas a brief chance to deliver a thoughtful reminder or an inspirational idea at an effective moment.
Given how critical and effective an email campaign can be, employing newsletter analytics should be a priority. Most email newsletters provide informational metrics as part of their most basic packages and before you unleash an email to a large audience, it’s good to know what data you will get back, and how to interpret it. Here are a few tips for reviewing email newsletter analytics:
· Open Rates Matter. An email is counted as “opened” when someone actually looks at it in their email client and does not merely delete it from the summary view or route it immediately to the trash bin. Look at your open rates and compare them to industry standards, but also consider them in the context of the audience you are mailing. Is this an audience that knows your name or is it a follow up list from a convention? You can expect the former to have a better open rate than the latter. In general, open rates of 15% to 25% are considered a success.
· Click-Throughs Matter. The content of your newsletter should inspire people to read more. Their clicks will be logged anonymously, and the data can later be reviewed to tell you what kind of content readers are interested in. For example, if you clicked through from the Tripepi Smith newsletter to read this, your click indicates that you are interested in having more effective newsletters. As a business, that is information we can use to tailor the services we offer. Click-through rates will give you a sense of what people are interested in and what they are not interested in, but people can’t click on links that aren’t there. Ideally, your email will provide snippets of articles with links to the full content on your website. Expect a Click-Through rate of 8-15% on average. (For more information on driving traffic to your website with email, click here.)
· Make sure you are using Google Analytics to track visits to your website. Ideally, comparing the analytic data 
from your email newsletter client with Google Analytic data will show spikes in website visitors on the days that new emails are sent out. The chart shown here is real data depicting how visits to the company’s website spike each week when their regular email newsletter is sent out.
Consistent assembly of a newsletter is hard to do (read our tips for successful campaigns here). They take time (5-15 hours on average depending on content), they require detailed attention to quality, and they will often involve feedback from other parts of the organization to complete. If your organization has made an investment in newsletter process, ensure you are getting some metrics to determine how the effort is being received and what topics your audience is most interested in. It’s small marginal effort that will pay off big in the long run.