How to Effectively Measure Your Email Newsletter Performance
Published by Spinutech on March 2, 2020
So you’ve built an email list of potential customers and fans of your brand. Nice work! You’ve also created a smart email marketing strategy and distributed some relevant email newsletters.
Now it’s time to measure your newsletter performance. But where do you start? There are some tried-and-true email metrics you’ll want to take a look at. You’ll also want to use UTM codes.
What Email Newsletter Metrics Should I Track and Measure?
It’s important to understand how the content of your newsletter is connecting with your target audience. When it comes to email marketing there are two main questions to consider.
- How are email newsletter recipients engaging with the newsletter directly?
- What are newsletter recipients doing after they click through to your website?
Often, when measuring email effectiveness, marketing teams will only consider the top-level marketing analytics. These metrics include deliverability, the percentage of emails opened (open rate), and/or how many individuals clicked through to the website (click-through rate).
While these metrics can provide you with a baseline to measure the success of your newsletter subject line, content, and calls to action (CTAs), there are more KPIs worth considering.
Other email marketing metrics and KPIs you might want to consider include:
- Click-to-open rate: Percentage of people who clicked on a link after opening your email.
- Unsubscribe rate: Percentage of recipients who opted out of your email list.
- Bounce rate: Percentage of individuals that never received your email.
Some additional overlooked newsletter analytics include the number of recipients that report an email as spam and the number of individuals that share or forward your email on to others.
These are all good email marketing metrics to track. However, these metrics only provide you with information about how email recipients are engaging with your newsletter directly. Once you establish that information, it’s time to dig deeper to track KPIs tied to conversion.
One Email Marketing KPI to Rule Them All
Conversion rate measures the percentage of newsletter recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired action, such as filling out a form or making a purchase.
While creating quality content is the foundation of any good email marketing strategy, it’s also important to consider what action you want the newsletter recipient to take. If your goal is to get individuals to download a white paper and they only skim the landing page or article that you directed them to, then you may need to reassess your newsletter and website content.
One way to measure email newsletter conversion rate is to create unique tracking URLs — by way of UTM codes — that link up actions taken by website visitors to a specific email campaign.
Use UTM Codes to Track Email Conversions
A UTM code is a snippet of text you can attach to the end of a URL to identify where your website traffic is coming from within Google Analytics. UTM codes can track a number of things, including a campaign, a source, a medium, a specific piece of content, or even a related term or keyword.
Google Analytics — and other major analytics tools — are already set up to read UTM codes. This means that you don’t have to get a web developer involved to start tracking newsletter data.
UTM Tracking Best Practices
A best practice for UTM tracking within your email newsletter is to create a new UTM code for each link you include. That way you can easily identify in Google Analytics how different parts of the newsletter are performing once a recipient clicks through to the website.
For example, are individuals who arrive at your website from a newsletter featuring a certain topic more likely to fill out a white paper request or schedule a demo? Or does a specific element within your newsletter lead to high bounce rates once a visitor arrives on your website?
UTM codes help you pinpoint what elements of your newsletter are connecting with your audience and which areas you should consider revisiting to increase conversions.
Email Metrics + UTM Codes = Newsletter Success
Tracking email newsletter data helps inform future campaign types and marketing strategies. If you are able to identify relevant trends through the newsletter analytics data you collect, then you can pivot and focus on what is working and adjust newsletter and website content to better support KPIs.
Established metrics combined with UTM tracking codes allow you to find out what actions newsletter subscribers are taking on your website. This allows for data-driven decisions.
Newsletters give you direct access to potential customers and fans of your brand. It’s important that you know the right metrics and data to measure. If you want to learn more about newsletter and content distribution strategy, connect with our email marketing experts.