Clickthroughs and conversions
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If you have any links in your newsletter, and you're interested in the newsletter's effectiveness in getting subscribers to click on these links, then you can calculate clickthrough rates.
It's relatively easy to measure when someone reaches the destination URL. It's either a web page, so there is a record in your server log file, or it's a redirect managed by some piece of server software, which also records the "click".
When you know the number of times a unique reader has clicked on each unique link in your newsletter, then you can calculate:
A clickthrough rate for each of these links:
- no. of people clicking on the link / number opening the email, OR
- no. of people clicking on the link / number of delivered emails, OR
- no. of people clicking on the link / number of emails sent.
A clickthrough rate for the newsletter as a whole:
- number of people clicking on at least one link / number opening the email, OR
- number of people clicking on at least one link / number of delivered emails, OR
- number of people clicking on at least one link / number of emails sent
If you're using commercial email marketing services or list software, then these kinds of numbers should appear automatically in your reports.
It's not important how you measure the clickthrough rate. What's important is that you measure it the same way over time. That way, you can track changes and differences, and use this information to modify your newsletter and its content.
For example, if the links are of the "for more information, click here" variety, then you can use the clickthrough rates to understand which topics and type of information elicit the best reader response.
If they're promotional links, then use clickthrough rates and conversion metrics (see below) to understand which type of sales copy works best in the promotional sections of your newsletter.
Don't worry too much about the results presented by other publishers - any differences might just be because they define and calculate their clickthroughs and metrics in another way.
For many publishers, clicks are not an end in themselves. The idea is to get the visitor to take some action once they've reached the destination URL (e.g. buy a product).
At this point, you can use normal website conversion metrics to gauge the success of your newsletter in driving whatever action you're interested in.
The problem with these clickthrough metrics is that they only measure the short-term effectiveness of your newsletter in persuading someone to follow a link, i.e. in generating repeat website traffic. While this is fine for some purposes, clickthroughs say nothing about the value of that click, which is where website metrics come in.
Clickthrough rates also say nothing about long-term benefits. Indeed, many newsletters are built for these long-term benefits only; clickthrough rates are unimportant, if not irrelevant.
Think of newsletters designed to build long-term trust and credibility, for example. Commercial newsletters with only long-term benefits in mind must ultimately fall back on the final quantitative metric for this chapter: ROI or return on investment.
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