Beyond Clicks to Behavioral Metrics for Newsletters

In the world of e-newsletters, everyone is familiar with the basic metrics to gauge success. The sales department reports back to its clients on the open and click rates for every issue that includes a client’s ad. At the publishing company where I work, we’re tracking behavioral metrics, in the form of the types of editorial our users are clicking on.

If I can classify everyone who clicked through to editorial by the type of story they read, then review that data over a period of months and find out how many unique individuals have interacted with each type, I’ve gleaned plenty of actionable intelligence.

We are fortunate in that our e-mail provider is also our fulfillment house and database vendor. So all our customers are in one place, and we can tie not only demographic data but also interactive data into their master database records.

To implement this analysis, we had each publication submit 10-15 content categories for its newsletters. Here is an example of the categories for one of our publications:

1) design
2) manufacturing/production
3) materials
4) technology
5) packaging
6) quality control/assurance
7) regulatory/legal affairs
8) research and development
9) software
10) sterilization
11) testing/validation.

These were loaded into our system and assigned as groups for this pub. After loading content for an issue of their e-newsletters, our editors go to a simple screen and choose a category for each story from a drop-down menu. That’s it. Another fantastic perk is that this tagging can be done for previous issues as well, and we still are able to capture the data. The editors can go back as time permits and categorize the content from past issues.

We are about one year into this and are starting to build some impressive results. Because we produce five daily newsletters and many weeklies, the pool of respondents in each category built up quickly. Some of our categories are now approaching 10,000 unique records, and many others have 2,000-3,000.

The benefits of these data are multifaceted. The editorial staff now have clear indications of which topics are resonating with their audience. Beyond just clicks, this tells us where to focus future editorial endeavors. It is research without the survey! Perhaps it can spark a new webinar idea or point us to a future seminar we should produce. We can use it to promote related internal events, Webinars, or data products. The list of ways we can use this information is endless.

For our advertising partners and sales team, this also opens up new opportunities. We can approach certain companies that manufacture products or services directly related to one of our categories, and instead of using the basic numbers on circ size and open and click rates, our salespeople can now show that we have, say, 4,000 unique records that not only opened but also clicked through to content specific to the category that they serve.

And of course, this initiative also proves that our company is pushing forward with new ways to serve our markets, to bring buyers and sellers together in more-targeted ways.

We are rolling this out to all of our franchises including our newly acquired publications. I’m excited about the possibilities internally and externally. Check with your e-mail provider to see if it can do the same for your newsletters.

Len Roberto is audience development director of Canon Communications.