Newsletter and Push metrics for a successful subscription strategy
Since Apple privacy policies are already having an impact on the email marketing analysis, paywall strategies need to consider how to skip these misleading open rate results.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection with iOS 15
Since Apple announcement last September about the new email privacy restrictions of iOs15 the newsletter business has been at risk. This is mainly due to the obsession with the “opening rate” as the main metric to measure a newsletter success. In this post we will discuss the best alternatives to this dying metric.
When setting up a newsletter and/or push notifications strategy you should follow this classic yet basic steps:
1.Set SMART objectives to reach your goals. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Reachable and Timebound objectives. For example. As my goal is to increase traffic to the Lifestyle section of my news website I will set as an objective to reach a 600 subscribers to my newsletter in the first month.
2.Define the right KPI to measure your success and allow you to pivot when necessary. Following our former example, we would monitor the number of subscribers to the newsletter on a monthly basis and consider that we should gain an average of 50 subscribers a month to reach our goal.
Now its when the fun starts. You decide to send your lifestyle newsletter twice a month and select the first set of articles for your newsletter. Now you need to decide how you´re going to measure how well you choose the articles so you need to gather information of your readers reactions to the push notification and newsletter.
Taking a step further the opening rate
If you made the mistake of choosing to look exclusively at the opening rate you will encounter several obstacles as most readers access their email vía their iPhones and the metrics might not be relevant given Apple´s restrictions. However if you set up your analytics tool to measure the launch of push notifications and newsletters as campaigns you will earn valuable insights.
Your campaigns should be designed to measure visits, actions, actions per visit, bounce rate and average time on site. This way you will know how many visits to your web has the newsletter or push notification triggered, has it pleased your audience (the answer is no if the bounce rate is high and the average time on site is low and it will be yes when the metrics are opposite).
Choose the right tools to track your SMART objectives
In the end what you really want to know is not if they have opened your email but if it has manage to attract, retain and eventually convert your readers into subscribers as that is your final goal. If you are one of our ITER WEB CMS users your readers will benefit from the content recommendation tools. You will also get the opening rate of the newsletters sent directly with our CMS, even though we strongly recommend you to take a little step further and use MAS default campaign monitoring tool to ensure you reach your goals.
If you would like to know more about how to make the most of your news website with intuitive and poweful IA software contact our expert team for an ITER+MAS Demo now.