ENTER: The Metrics that Matter
Will your subscribers stay with you? Will they open your posts? Will they tell their friends?
You’ve done all the work to set up your newsletter and write a post that you think will serve the needs of your readers … how do you know if all that work is being appreciated? Of course watching your number of subscribers grow is always a warm and fuzzy feeling, but that’s just readers coming through the door. Will they stay? Will they open your posts? Will they tell their friends about you?
Immediate Feedback: Views and Open Rate
One of the most powerful learning guides is immediate feedback, which is extremely hard to get especially with creative projects. However, Substack provides two metrics which give us almost instant feedback, calculated after every published post: views and open rate. Your dashboard gives you a 30-day look at these … here’s what mine looked like as I was writing this post when I had 417 subscribers.
You can also see views and open rate for every post which can help guide your understanding of what your readers are opening. We’ll talk more about this when we get to the ENGAGE phase of the Reader Engagement Process. (REP)
The guidelines for a “good” open rate runs from 30% to 60%. What’s more important is to watch the direction your own numbers are going and understanding what affect them … basically what you’re writing about and the quality of your writing. Readers read what interests them.
Catch their attention early with your Title, Subtitle and Opening Lines.
Substack Analytics: Tracking Your Newsletter’s Performance (9/2023)
Open rate: The percentage of people who opened this post after receiving an email or Substack app notification about it. If one person opens your post five times, that counts as one open.
Total views: The number of views on your post, similar to page views. They include both web, email, or the Substack app.