209: Is Your Newsletter Actually Working? Simple Metrics to Know for Sure

Foreign welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of Digital Product Entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today. Hi there Destiny here. So today I want to jump in and talk about a question that I get asked all the time and it is around how do I know how my newsletter is doing? So really what this comes down to is somewhat of a gut feeling. But more importantly, there are some metrics that you can be looking at and tracking on a monthly basis to see how you are actually moving the needle both with your newsletter and with your business overall. So I'm going to go over some of those metrics today. Today I also have a Google Sheet that you can make a copy of that I'm giving out to all of my Creators MBA newsletter. So if you're on my email list you will get this. The first one that I want to cover is really kind of the most obvious stuff that we need to be tracking and that is how many people are signing up. So this is looking at your overall list growth and that is something that you want to keep an eye on over time. Are you steadily gaining new readers? Are more people joining than leaving? A simple spreadsheet will help you track this weekly subscriber count and what I have in the spreadsheet I have you tracking total subscribers, the new subscribers for the month, the unsubscribes for the month, and net growth. The other thing that I want you to track related to your subscriber list growth are your conversion rates. Meaning if you have a hundred people visit the signup page to opt in to get on your newsletter, but only 20 of them subscribe, that's a 20% conversion rate. I really think we could get that up higher than that. So you might want to look at making some tweaks here and there, doing a little tweak every single month to see how it moves the needle. The other thing is if you have pop up forms on your website or maybe in your blog post, you have embedded places for them to sign up for your email list, you can monitor and track all of those forms. In addition, if you are spending money on ads for promotions to get people onto your email list, you're definitely going to want to track your cost per lead for those new email subscribers. So for instance, let's say you're spending $50 to get 10 new email subscribers. That's $5 per person. Is that worth it to you or is it not? It really depends on what you're selling on the back end. So that's another thing that you're going to want to track. The next section in the spreadsheet is all about engagement. So having 1,000 subscribers really means absolutely nothing if nobody is opening up your emails. One of the obvious things that you're going to want to track here is the open rates. This can vary by industry, but smaller, more targeted newsletters often will see 40% or more open rates. And that's the majority, I think, of people who are listing here. So that's what we want to shoot for. Mostly between 30 to a 40% open rate. If your open rates are dropped, a couple of things you might want to look at, and the main one is your subject lines. So maybe you need to work a little bit more on those subject lines to get people to open your email. The other thing that you'll want to track is if people are actually engaging with your content. Are they clicking those links that you include? Low clicks might mean that your content isn't connecting or your calls to actions aren't clear enough so you want them to be clear. Depending on what your goal is, if you're trying to get them like click to go to like a blog post, you might want it to be a little more suspenseful, maybe not give away all the content in your email so you have to play around with it and test some things out. The other thing that you can do here is track the percentage of your regular readers. Those are your superfans and people who open nearly everything you send. I would say those people are absolutely gold. They are most likely to support you financially, tell their friends about you, and give you valuable feedback. I could tell you that I've gotten responses from people who have been on my email list and those responses have helped me shape my paid programs and actually quite frankly improve the quality of the content I am giving them. The other area that you want to track is your revenue and how much money you are making from your newsletter. So if you're trying to earn money, which I think most of us are, from our newsletter, here's what I want you to track. One would be the conversion to paid supporters. So this would be like if you offer a premium version of your newsletter or some type of membership like paid newsletter, how many of these free subscribers eventually upgrade to your paid content subscription? This will tell you if your free content is Compelling enough to make people want more from you. Ad revenue matters if you are running sponsor content or ads. So you're going to want to track how much you are earning per thousand emails sent and which ad placements get the most clicks for your sponsorships. That's a very, very clear metric because a lot of sponsors, they're going to know if they can get this number of clicks from your newsletter to their landing page. Depending on what their landing page is converting at. That will give them a really good indication on how many new email subscribers or leads they're going to get as a result of their promotion. The other thing I track is audience feedback. What do your readers actually think? So here numbers aren't going to tell you the whole story. So you need to hear directly from people who are actually reading your content, engaging with your content. You can do some reader scrolling surveys. I highly recommend it. Do some polls, do some reader surveys because they can give you so much information about what your audience loves or what they don't love. Keep them short. Nobody's going to want to fill out a 20 question survey, but they will click a couple buttons to give you some feedback. The other thing I want you to pay attention to are email replies. So when somebody takes the time to write you back, they are giving you so much valuable information. Not only have they taken time out of their very busy schedule and it's hard, right, for them to take time, think about what to write, write back to you and, and do that. So you want to make it easy for them to respond and actually read what they said. Here's what I want you to do. Here's your next action step. I want you to create your simple metrics dashboard. Don't try to track everything. You're going to drive yourself crazy. So here's what I recommend. Kind of figure out your main goal first. Is it growing an audience? Is it making money? Is it building that community? Getting those replies? And then I want you to pick two to three metrics from each of the categories that we talked about today that align with that goal. And then you're going to set up a simple spreadsheet or dashboard to check weekly or monthly, depending on how you want to do it. That'll give you a way to compare your numbers to your own past performance and give you an idea of how much your newsletter is growing in terms of subscribers revenue. Now here's what I don't want you to do. I don't want you to get hung up on vanity metrics like total subscribers. Nobody cares how many people are on your email list. All right, so here's what I'm going to leave you with today. I want you to remember that these metrics are just tools. These numbers are here to help you understand if you're serving your readers well. The best metric is whether your newsletter is helping your audience and meeting your goals. So so don't forget to grab the spreadsheet. If you're on my Creators MBA email list, I'm going to give you a copy of it. You can make a copy of the Google Sheet and then let me know how it goes. I'd love to know what questions you have about tracking your newsletter metrics and I hope you have a great rest of your day and bye for now. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.