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I got an email from a reader this week who told me they were struggling with the content of their newsletter. They felt like every edition had to be perfect.

I’ll tell you what I told them: When you write a newsletter, whether it comes out every day or every week or every month, you’re going to have editions that are absolutely great, and some that fall a little short. They can’t all be A+ newsletters.

You should set the bar high for your newsletter and try meet it every time. But if you don’t, that’s OK. Whatever happens with the newsletter you send today, you’ll get the chance to do better with the one you send tomorrow.

—Dan (say 👋 via email or LinkedIn)

25 Ways to Measure the Success of Your Newsletter

Open rate and click rate aren’t the only ways to tell if your newsletter is successful. The best newsletters look at metrics around these key categories to understand what’s working:

Engagement
Growth
Monetization
Feedback

So I dove into each of these categories and looked at 25 different ways you can measure newsletter success, from metrics you’re certainly familiar with (list growth, bounce rate) to ones that might be new to you (payback period, Net Promoter Score).

My hope is that as you read through the article, you’ll be able to find one new metric from each category that you can start measuring to figure out how to keep improving your newsletter. Here are the 25 metrics →

2024 State of Email Newsletters by beehiiv

Last week, beehiiv released their 2024 State of Email Newsletters report, and there were a few fascinating nuggets I wanted to highlight:

They found that email subject lines with 20 or fewer characters had the highest open rates, and ones with 21 to 40 characters were nearly as effective.
They found very little difference in open rates based on day of the week — though emails sent on Saturdays did have a lower open rate than the rest of the week.
They found that email open rates peaked between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

There’s lots more to dive into in the full 2024 State of Email Newsletters report.

*This content has been promoted by our partners*

In case you missed it...

So many non-profits make the same errors in their newsletters. Here’s how to adjust your strategy to avoid these mistakes.

There are so many tactics newsletters use to stay out of the spam folder, but not all work equally well. These four tactics are actually worth trying.

Personality is all about you and your voice. Personalization is about a reader’s interests or needs. Here are strategies to insert both into your newsletter.

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📬 No. 18 | How to Measure Newsletter Success

25 Ways to Measure the Success of Your Newsletter

2024 State of Email Newsletters by beehiiv

In case you missed it...

Older messages

📬 No. 17 | Mistakes Non-Profits Make

📬 No. 16 | Steps for Great Deliverability

📬 No. 15 | Can You Still Trust Click Rates?

📬 No. 14 | Picking the right platform for your newsletter

📬 No. 13 | What I Wish I’d Known

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