The Truth Behind Email Newsletter Metrics

Metrics continue to be a real hot spot for publishers and marketers alike. It’s become so much of an issue that I am collaborating with a friend of mine to write a strategic report called “Online Metrics Demystified: What Marketers and Publishers Need to Know to Buy and Sell Online Media” … or something like that. Be on the lookout for it next month.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share a conversation that I recently had with someone trying to make sense of email newsletter metrics. They asked me for the definition of several email-related metrics. Hope this helps!

What should the circ of a publication’s email newsletter be? 
ERIC: This completely depends on the size of the market, the targeting of the newsletter, and the strategy used to build the circ. Many publications have a general email newsletter for their entire market and others that are more niche even within their own market. If it is a large market, like IT or a more broad-based niche consumer market, I would expect a decent general newsletter to have well over 100K. But if it’s targeted on something specific like enterprise messaging or stamp collecting then I would expect that number to drop significantly. Smaller markets will of course have smaller email circ numbers. If the publication uses an opt-out and list-cleansing circ strategy, I would expect the numbers to be higher than if the publication used a double opt-in circ strategy. A good rule of thumb is that the pub’s general email newsletter should have around the same circ as their print publication, but again, there are many variables that could affect that.

What is a good open rate for an email newsletter?
ERIC: Everyone wants to use this metric to measure the engagement of their email audience. For a decent rule of thumb, I generally consider 20-35% open rate about normal. Below 20% is on the low end and you should try to clean up your list. 35-50% should be considered really good, and anything above 50% is simply stellar. That being said, there are some caveats. Open rates are typically measured by an invisible graphic that is embedded into the email message. When a user opens the email, the image is pulled from the email delivery system and an open is recorded by the email system. However, this means that you cannot measure the open rate of text-format, non-HTML newsletters since they, by definition, cannot have embedded images. (BTW, you can have an all-text newsletter but still be using an HTML format. There may no visibile images per se, but because the newsletter is in HTML, the tracking image can still be embedded.) Also, more and more email readers are not loading images by defaut. This means that the tracking image is also not being loaded. Thus, even though people may be reading the email, it is never counted as an open. This includes people who use Gmail, the new version of Outlook (which has images turned off by default), and the significantly increasing number of people who read email on handheld devices (Blackberrys, Treos, etc.) and email capable mobile phones. Bottom line? Take open rate with a big grain of salt … actual opens are more than we are recording through our email delivery systems. Yes, we are seeing declining open rates across the entire industry, but my opinion is that much of it has to do with email readers that no longer load images and thus do not register as opens.

What is a goold click through rate for an email newsletter?
ERIC: You need to look at two types of CTRs and define which you are measuring. I always define Total Newsletter CTR as the total number of clicks the entire email received (there are usually multiple URLs in any given email newsletter) divided by the total emails sent, not delivered. I use emails sent because that is what publishers also use as their “rate base” for charging advertisers. Sure, we’d like to use email delivered or opened instead because it jacks up CTR, but using emails sent is a true apples to apples comparison. Total Newsletter CTR can vary widely depending on the style of the newsletter. If it is a columnist-style newsletter with a single author and all of the content in the email, there will be much fewer clicks than on a digest style newsletter where it contains headlines, synopsis, and then links back to the publisher’s site for the rest of the content. Thus you cannot just look at Total Newsletter CTR as a measurement of reader engagement or effectiveness for an advertiser. The other metric is Advertiser CTR. This is where you look at a single ad position in the newsletter, say the primary position, and divide the number of clicks that the ad received by total emails sent. This is a much better representation of the effectiveness of the email newsletter for advertisers than Total Newsletter CTR. Of course there is a variation on this metric as well: Advertiser Unique CTR. A single individual may click on the same ad more than once. Advertiser Unique CTR only counts the unique individuals that click, not the total number of clicks. Bottom, line … I feel that Advertiser CTR (not unique) is the most relevant metric for advertisers.