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Compton Communications"An Internet Communications Agency"
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Articles
Does your e-newsletter measure up?Posted Monday, August 25, 2003 Evaluating or measuring an e-newsletter is easy although a bit confusing. Statistics are readily available from your email and list management programs, but deciphering what they mean can take a little effort. Making your e-newsletter measure up means you understand the most important numbers reported by list managers or email marketing programs. The best measure for an e-newsletter is subscribers. Part of your initial planning for a newsletter should be setting some subscriber goals. For example, the first quarter goal could be 5,000 subscribers, second year 10,000 and third year sustain 10,000. Each issue you can measure your success toward goal. Another example with subscribers is if you are producing currently a 500-copy customer newsletter by direct mail and you want to set a goal to move half to email. Be careful of false savings or distribution restrictions in moving to an e-newsletter. Moving from print to email with a newsletter may cause additional costs if employees print out each issue at the office because you selected a format that is hard to read online. Web pages are not very good as company newsletters since company internal information cannot be readily discussed before it become public. Placing employee publications on Intranets can solve this problem. Secondly, having to reformat the newsletter for email or purchase list software can add to costs. Email list management programs provide statistics for new subscribes, unsubscribes, referrals and bounces. All are statistics vital to indicating e-newsletter success. New subscribes is a prime statistic if your goal is to grow your list of subscribers. If your list is set up to send a welcome letter, new subscribes can be as simple as counting the number of welcome letters send each month. Unsubscribes are going to occur as people move email accounts or move to new email services or in the worse case decide they no longer want your e-newsletter. Prepare a farewell email and canvas readers to find out why they are leaving. Their responses may show changes are needed in content or design. Good list management software for e-newsletters will handle changes in email address without forcing a reader to unsubscribe. A Referral is a simple link in each newsletter so that the user can click to send a copy of the e-newsletter or a good article to a friend. Referral is the simplest way to grow your e-newsletter readership. A bounces indicates when an e-newsletter was not sent because the email address is wrong, the reader’s mailbox is full or the connection was broken or refused. Editors should closely monitor bounces as a way of making sure the e-newsletter is getting to readers. Some e-newsletters can set off SPAM filters that cause your e-newsletter to be labeled as SPAM and blocked or deleted. Monitoring bounces can show you when these problems arise. Assuming the e-newsletter gets to the intended reader, the second measures are open rates and click thrus. Open rates are used primarily with HTML e-newsletters to indicate the number of e-newsletters that were opened by the readers email program. Some list management programs combine numbers for both text and HTML formats, so you may have to derive an average and compare weekly for changes. Click thrus are measures of response to hyperlinks that are in your e-newsletters. Good list management programs will measure click thrus. Click thrus show what readers are interested what articles in your e-newsletter and are clicking thru to your Web site for more information. A final common measure used by many e-newsletter programs is Delivered rate. This is simply the number of subscribers minus the number of bounces on each issue. So take a look at your e-newsletter and see how it measures up. |