🧑‍🔬 Analyzing your audience

Trusting your intuition regarding your business, staff, and readers is essential for a long-lasting, successful publication. If you're noticing that your quality content just isn't getting the attention it used to, it may be time to take a step back and assess the situation. This week's newsletter is about how web analytics can help you better understand your subscribers, what you can do to catch more email clicks, and ways to bounce back from a high bounce rate. Let's go!

In this week's issue 📨

• Web analytics explained
• Increase your click rate
• Reduce your email bounces

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Track star

Web analytics provide a strong signal of what’s going on with your business and how big of an impact your work has on the world. They help you understand which posts are your most successful, what topics your readers are clicking on, and how visitors are being led to your site in the first place. If you want to stay motivated to create great experiences and content, positive web analytics are a must.

If you're just getting started in the analytics arena, let's examine some of the most important metrics that can lead you down a successful road.

Growth

• When it comes to analytics, your growth rate may be the most important to give you the most precise picture. You'll want to know how many people are visiting your site, your growth trends over the last week, month, or year, and if your traffic patterns are going up, down, or staying flat.
• You can use analytics apps like Plausible to track unique visitors, which is the number of people visiting your site in a particular period. Keep in mind that traffic from unique visitors differs slightly from page views because one person will usually view several different pages during a single visit.

Discovery

• If you're looking for fresh marketing ideas to continue your positive growth trends, understanding how your readers are discovering your content is key. Advanced analytics tools like Google Analytics will show you where a site visitor came from, confirming if your marketing efforts are working.
• Referral traffic describes the people who visit your publication from other sites without searching for you on Google. Identifying your most successful referral sources will help you understand the types of communication and marketing campaigns that are best for your audience.

Views

• Knowing what readers are clicking on when perusing your publication can help you better allocate your future time and efforts to create more content your audience is interested in. Metrics such as page views, bounce rate, and visit duration can show you which pages are most useful.
• Easy-to-use analytics platforms like Simple Analytics can reveal which of your pages are the top performers of your website. Meanwhile, your bounce rate can reveal when a visitor leaves your site after only viewing a single page. This helps you determine if you need to adjust your success strategies.

Conversions

• Most web analytics tools allow you to set goals and events to track visitor actions that matter the most to them. This can include the number of visitors who subscribe to your newsletter, sign up for a trial, buy your product, click on an external link, download a file, or complete a checkout form.
• Goal conversions matter because they can be tied to referral sources and the pages on your site that were visited during the session before the conversion. This lets you know exactly where your best customers are coming from and what actions they’re taking along the way.

Interesting stories & ideas 📚

• What we learned in our first year – 404 Media
• Reporting neurodiversity – Press Gazette
• Thriving in smaller community spaces – Creativerly
• Do it the hard way – Ryan Holiday
• How to be more concise – Wes Koa's Newsletter

Right clicks

Your newsletter's click-through rate (CTR) represents the percentage of subscribers who opened your email and clicked on a link. The higher your CTR, the more your audience is engaged with your work and the happier they are. If you're not seeing much action regarding clicks, you may need to beef up your content and email strategies to grab more attention.

Jesse Sumrak, content writer for Classy, provides some tips on dynamically engaging with your audience to catch more clicks.

#1 Write eye-catching subject lines to increase your open rate. Your subscribers can't click on your links if they don't open your newsletter first.

#2 Get to the point and simplify your writing so your audience can quickly absorb what you're trying to say and know why it's important.

#3 Include a clear call to action (CTA), so your readers know exactly what to do or why they should click on a link. Keep things brief yet actionable.

#4 Use buttons with hyperlinks to highlight your CTA in more exciting ways. Experiment with different wording that aligns with your message.

#5 Keep things consistent so your tone of voice always reflects your brand. This will boost your credibility, which also increases clicks and conversions.

#6 Incorporate more media like photos, charts, graphs, and videos to encourage more clicks. We never grow out of "ohhh pretty colors."

#7 Try different formats to find what works for your target audience. Short emails are usually best, but don't be afraid to switch up your layout.

#8 Experiment with a P.S. section to cover all of your bases. Readers usually remember the first and last items in an email specifically.

#9 Timing is everything when avoiding someone's spam folder. Following a regular newsletter-sending schedule builds good reading habits.

#10 Test and retest as your audience grows and your content evolves. You can increase clicks just by trying new things to see what fails and what succeeds.

Bounce back

Feeling good about calculating your email bounce rate only to discover that it's higher than expected can leave you down in the dumps about your newsletter-sending strategy. Now you're worried about your sender reputation and email deliverability, but fret not, chum! You can do plenty to reduce your email bounces and ensure you and your audience are happy campers.

Tiff Regaudie, content consultant at Klaviyo, helps us implement bounce-back solutions to secure smooth newsletter delivery.

‣ Ensure the email addresses (your members) are real people who have opted in to receive your newsletter. You never want to buy a list of random emails or send messages to inboxes who haven't consented. Try limiting the number of on-site giveaways or contests aimed at collecting email addresses.

‣ To be sure that your subscribers really want your newsletter, enable double opt-in so they can confirm their subscription before being added to your list. This protects you from email typos, spam bots, and site visitors who add their email addresses to your form but don't want to confirm anything officially.

‣ It’s essential to clean up your email list regularly to weed out any profiles who shouldn’t be receiving your newsletter. This will improve your sending reputation over time. Start with any hard bounces, like when a post can’t be delivered due to a misspelled email address.

‣ What about soft bounces, like someone with a full inbox or an email server that’s temporarily down? If these bounces are consistent with particular members, you can limit how frequently you send to them by creating an email list segment and excluding them from your messages temporarily.

‣ Send newsletters at the same time(s) every day, week, or month to maintain strong open rates and a positive subscriber relationship. A consistent sending schedule will help you identify who's no longer interested. If you always send to the unengaged, their lack of interest can hurt your sender reputation.

‣ Identify which readers haven't interacted with your emails in a while and check in with them about changing their preferences. Maybe they just want to hear from you less but not unsubscribe completely, and that's ok! Providing them with different choices lessens the likelihood that they’ll unsubscribe altogether.

Curator's pick ✍️

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