209: Is Your Newsletter Actually Working? Simple Metrics to Know for Sure
Ever found yourself staring at your newsletter stats wondering if all your hard work is actually paying off? You're definitely not alone!
In this week's episode, I'm tackling one of the questions I hear most often from digital product creators: how to know if your newsletter is truly performing. Beyond just watching subscriber counts tick up (or down), there are specific metrics that can tell you whether your newsletter is genuinely supporting your business goals.
I'll walk you through:
The subscriber growth numbers that actually matter (and it's not just total subscribers!)
How to measure engagement in ways that predict future sales
Simple ways to track revenue generated directly from your newsletter
A practical approach to gathering valuable reader feedback
How to set up a simple tracking dashboard without getting overwhelmed
As a special bonus for listeners, I'm sharing my personal newsletter tracking spreadsheet that you can copy and customize for your own business. No more guessing whether your newsletter strategy is working! Make a copy of the Google sheet here.
Episode Highlights:
[00:01:00] Understanding subscriber growth metrics - tracking new sign-ups, conversion rates from opt-in pages, and cost per lead for paid promotions
[00:04:00] Newsletter engagement metrics - aim for 30-40% open rates and why your "super fans" who consistently open are pure gold
[00:06:00] Revenue tracking - how to measure conversions to paid offerings and sponsorship performance
[00:07:00] The importance of qualitative feedback through reader surveys and email replies
[00:08:00] Creating your simple metrics dashboard - how to choose 2-3 key metrics aligned with your main business goal
The Ultimate Guide to Tracking Your Newsletter Performance: Metrics That Actually Matter
If you've been sending out newsletters for your business but find yourself wondering, "Is this actually working?" - you're not alone. As digital entrepreneurs, we invest significant time crafting valuable content for our email subscribers, but without tracking the right metrics, we're essentially flying blind.
In this comprehensive guide, I'll walk you through the essential metrics you should be monitoring to ensure your newsletter is effectively supporting your business goals. Plus, I'll share practical strategies for improving these numbers without getting lost in vanity metrics that don't ultimately matter.
Why Newsletter Tracking Matters in Your Digital Product Business
Your newsletter isn't just a communication tool—it's often the backbone of your entire digital product ecosystem. It's where relationships deepen, trust builds, and ultimately where many of your sales originate. But a newsletter that isn't performing well can drain your resources without delivering results.
When properly tracked, your newsletter metrics tell a story about your audience: what they care about, what problems they're trying to solve, and how ready they are to invest in your solutions. This data becomes invaluable when designing new digital products, refining your messaging, or deciding where to focus your limited time and energy.
Most importantly, consistent tracking allows you to make small, strategic improvements over time rather than dramatic overhauls that might disrupt the connection you've already established with your audience.
Essential Subscriber Growth Metrics to Monitor Monthly
The foundation of any successful newsletter is, of course, having people to send it to. But growing your list isn't just about quantity—it's about attracting the right people who will engage with your content and eventually become customers.
Here are the key subscriber growth metrics you should be tracking:
Total Subscriber Count: While this shouldn't be your primary focus, it's still important to track your overall list size to understand broader growth trends.
New Subscribers (Monthly): How many fresh faces joined your community this month? This number helps you gauge the effectiveness of your current lead generation efforts.
Unsubscribes (Monthly): People leaving your list isn't always negative—sometimes it's just list hygiene. However, a sudden spike in unsubscribes after a particular email might indicate a messaging problem that needs addressing.
Net Growth: This simple calculation (new subscribers minus unsubscribes) shows whether your list is actually growing or shrinking.
Conversion Rates on Signup Pages: If 100 people visit your newsletter signup page but only 20 subscribe, that's a 20% conversion rate—which likely has room for improvement. Test different headlines, benefit statements, or lead magnets to increase this number.
Performance by Signup Source: Are your embedded blog form signups outperforming your popup forms? Are Instagram traffic conversions better than Pinterest? Tracking these differences helps you double down on what's working.
Cost Per Lead (for Paid Acquisition): If you're spending money on ads to grow your list, knowing exactly how much each new subscriber costs is essential. Is spending $5 to acquire an email subscriber worth it for your business model? The answer depends on your backend monetization strategy.
By reviewing these metrics monthly, you'll quickly spot patterns and opportunities for strategic adjustments to your list-building approach.
Engagement Metrics: The True Measure of Newsletter Success
Having thousands of subscribers means nothing if they're not actually opening and engaging with your content. These metrics help you understand if your newsletter is resonating with your audience:
Open Rate: Aim for 30-40% open rates, which is achievable for focused, niche newsletters. If your open rates are consistently below 20%, it's time to experiment with different subject lines or sending times.
Click Rate: What percentage of people who open your email actually click on the links inside? Low click rates might indicate that your content isn't compelling enough or that your calls to action aren't clear.
Super Fan Percentage: These are the gold-standard subscribers who open nearly everything you send. They're most likely to purchase from you, provide valuable feedback, and refer others to your business. Track what percentage of your list falls into this category.
Reply Rate: When readers take the time to reply to your emails, it indicates strong engagement. Track how many responses you receive after each send, especially if you've asked a direct question or encouraged replies.
Forward/Share Rate: If available in your email platform, this metric shows how often your content is being shared with others—a strong indicator of quality and relevance.
Remember that engagement trends over time often tell a more valuable story than individual email performance. Look for patterns in what types of content consistently generate the most engagement from your audience.
Revenue Metrics: Connecting Newsletter Performance to Business Results
At the end of the day, your newsletter exists to support your business goals—which usually involve revenue generation. Here's how to track the money side of your newsletter:
Conversion to Paid Products/Services: What percentage of your free subscribers eventually purchase your digital products, courses, or services? This is perhaps the most important metric for a newsletter supporting a digital product business.
Revenue Per Subscriber: Simply divide your newsletter-attributed revenue by your subscriber count. This helps you understand the average value of each person on your list.
Premium Newsletter Conversion Rate: If you offer a paid newsletter tier, track what percentage of free subscribers upgrade over time.
Sponsorship/Ad Revenue: If you monetize through sponsorships, track revenue per thousand emails sent and which ad placements get the most clicks.
Affiliate Conversion Rates: If you promote affiliate products, which ones resonate most with your audience? Track both click-through and conversion rates.
By connecting these revenue metrics to your content strategy, you'll begin to see clear patterns in what types of content ultimately drive business results versus what merely seems popular.
Qualitative Feedback: The Metrics Beyond the Numbers
Not everything valuable can be measured in percentages. Some of the most insightful newsletter metrics are actually qualitative:
Survey Responses: Short subscriber surveys can reveal motivations, challenges, and preferences that numbers alone cannot tell you. Keep these brief (3-5 questions maximum) and run them quarterly.
Email Replies: Personal responses to your newsletter contain gold mines of information. Track common themes in the questions, objections, or praise you receive.
Testimonials: When subscribers share positive experiences with your newsletter or how it helped them achieve results, document these as evidence of your newsletter's impact.
Content Requests: What topics do your subscribers consistently ask for more information about? These requests often signal potential product development opportunities.
Make it a habit to review this qualitative feedback monthly alongside your quantitative metrics. Often, the combination reveals insights that neither could provide alone.
Creating Your Simple Newsletter Tracking Dashboard
Now that we've covered the essential metrics, let's talk about how to actually track them without driving yourself crazy. The key is simplicity and consistency.
First, identify your primary newsletter goal. Is it audience growth, community building, or direct revenue generation? Choose 2-3 metrics from each category above that most closely align with that goal.
Next, create a simple spreadsheet with tabs for each major category: Growth, Engagement, Revenue, and Qualitative Insights. Set up columns for each metric you're tracking, with rows for each week or month.
Schedule a recurring 30-minute appointment with yourself (or your team) to update this dashboard and review trends. Monthly reviews are sufficient for most businesses, though weekly might be appropriate if your newsletter is your primary business model.
Most importantly, use this data to make one small improvement each month. Test a new subject line format, try a different call to action placement, or experiment with your email design. Document what changes you make so you can correctly attribute any improvements in your metrics.
Final Thoughts: Metrics in Service of Your Mission
While tracking the right metrics is essential for newsletter success, remember that these numbers are ultimately just tools to help you better serve your audience. The best newsletter isn't necessarily the one with the highest open rate or the largest subscriber count—it's the one that most effectively helps your specific audience solve their problems while supporting your business goals.
Focus on providing genuine value, building authentic connections, and using metrics as guideposts rather than definitions of success. When your newsletter genuinely serves your readers, the numbers tend to follow.
Ready to start tracking more effectively? I've created a simple Google Sheet template that includes all the metrics discussed in this article, with formulas already set up for easy tracking. Just make a copy and customize it for your own newsletter needs!
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Transcript:
Welcome to the Creator's MBA podcast, your go-to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destini Copp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desk. Constantly live, launching or worrying about the social media algorithms.
I hope you enjoy our episode today.
Hi there, Destini 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? doing. So really what this comes down to is somewhat of a gut feeling. But more importantly, there are
[00:01:00] 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. I also have a Google sheet that you can make a copy of that I'm giving out to all of my Creators MBA newsletters. 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 are you steadily gaining new readers? Are more people joining than leaving? A simple spreadsheet will
[00:02:00] 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 percent 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
[00:03:00] or maybe in your blog posts, 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 costs per lead for those new email subscribers.
So for instance, let's say you're spending 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 backend. 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 1000 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 rate. This
[00:04:00] can vary by industry, but smaller, more targeted newsletters often will see 40 percent or more open rates.
And that's the majority, I think, of people who are listening here. So that's what we want to shoot for. Mostly between 30 to 40 percent open rates. If your open rates are dropping a couple of things you might want to look at, and the main one is your subject line.
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
[00:05:00] 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 super fans 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 can tell you that I've gotten responses from people who have been on my email list and those responsive have helped me shaped 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
[00:06:00] 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, 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 sponsored content or ads. So you're going to want to track how much you are earning per thousand email 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
[00:07:00] 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 to 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 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 of buttons to give you some feedback the other thing I want you to pay attention to our
[00:08:00] email replies. So when somebody takes the time to write you back, they're 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 sent. 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 gonna 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
[00:09:00] 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, 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. Alright, 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, 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
[00:10:00] 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 Podcast or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.