Newsletters are the most popular way to share updates about competitive and market intelligence with teams. They are often used to share a weekly analysis. As a comparison, messaging apps such as Microsoft Teams are used for urgent updates. This tutorial and product update describes how to monitor competitive and market intelligence newsletter analytics. We hope it will help you measure the impact of your market or competitive intelligence program, fine tune your intel delivery and grow your stakeholders’ success.
Why monitor newsletter analytics?
Effectively delivering competitive and market insights to your audience (sales, marketing, product, etc) is not easy. And measuring your impact is hard as information is shared in many ways. Fortunately, Cronycle makes it easy to monitor competitive intelligence analytics within the newsletter feature.
Indeed, you can easily check newsletter analytics. This is a great way to monitor your performance and answer the following questions:
- Does your audience appreciate your email updates?
- Who is actively checking them? If your best aficionados are performing better than average in their job, what role does your newsletters play?
- What information your subscribers value the most?
- Which format works better – articles with your summary, tweets, notes?
- What part of your audience is not served well with your newsletters? Who dropped out?
- What titles are working best to attract attention?
How to monitor newsletter analytics to measure the impact of a market or competitive intelligence program?
After you have sent at least one newsletter issue, you can check metrics by clicking on Past issues & analytics from the newsletter editor.
Top level newsletter analytics
For each issue sent from a specific board, you can see and compare:
- Title of the newsletter issue with an option to open a preview and a button to download as PDF.
- Date the newsletter issue was sent.
- Number of subscribers the issue was sent to. These are the contacts subscribed at the time of sending or scheduling.
- Amount of subscribers who received the issue. These are the subscribers minus the hard bounces.
- Count of subscribers who triggered a hard bounce. This happens for example when an email address does not exist. You can delete these contacts across all your mailing systems. The alternative is keep them as is – no more emails are sent to hard bounced contacts across all your boards.
- Open rate for the issue, showing the percentage of subscribers who opened the email. This is the most important metric. Indeed, subscribers can usually read the most critical information without clicking on links within the issue.
- Click rate corresponding to the number of subscribers who clicked on a link within the issue. If you are using notes and include your analysis extensively in the email, this is not a critical metric.
Detailed newsletter issue metrics
In addition, click on open and click rates to see more details – all very important when it comes to competitive or market intelligence analytics:
- Who opened the newsletter issue, with the list of subscribers and absolute count.
- What links subscribers clicked within the newsletter issue, with the target URL. Note that URLs in the newsletter are shortened and include tracking, so they are different that the destination which is shown here.
- Who clicked somewhere on the newsletter issue, with the list of subscribers and absolute count. Click on the Who clicked tab to switch to this view, and come back to Clicked links with the other tab.
We built all tables to make it easy to highlight rows and columns with your cursor, copy and paste into a sheet for further analysis.
Note: if your audience is using Apple Mail, be aware that their privacy protection has an impact on newsletters open rates. They may be different from actual engagement. There is no impact on click rates.
Improve the impact of competitive and market intelligence newsletters with analytics
There are many aspects to measuring the impact of market and competitive intelligence programs, but engagement of your audience is key to success.
On one side, we all receive too many emails – seeing good engagement is highly encouraging and proves value delivery. On the other side, low engagement figures show there is an issue with one or several aspects among:
- Email title
- Delivery method
- Email deliverability
- Timing and pace
- List of subscribers
- Content
- Content format.
While analytics cannot alone answer what is wrong, it lets you know something needs to change. You can then modify one (or two) aspects in the next issues, monitor, and see if you notice any upward trend. Do not change all parameters at once – otherwise you will not know what impacted positively or negatively.
If you notice a high bounce rate, update your subscribers list and ask them to add the sender email address as a contact (so the emails don’t get flagged).
When the open rate is low, focus on the title, delivery method, timing and list of subscribers.
If the click rate is low, maybe there is no problem – many sales and marketing team members need an overview of the updates and don’t necessarily need to dive deep into the context. Here, the most important is your analysis, which in the case of Cronycle newsletters is available in the summaries and notes – i.e. without clicking.
You can further explore the challenges you are facing with qualitative feedback. Talking to a small set of stakeholders should bring light on major issues you are facing.
We hope this feature update and tutorial on newsletter analytics will help you measure and increase the impact of your market or competitive intelligence program, and help your recipients be more effective in their work.
