Peter Boyd is an attorney and the Founder of PaperStreet. He has successfully helped 1,500 law firms with their websites and marketing.
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Key performance indicators are business metrics that can help you evaluate whether you are achieving your goals. However, these numbers can be meaningless if you don’t understand what they represent and how to use them.
A law firm may have 50 to 100 metrics to consider overall in judging performance. Each aspect of your marketing strategy will have several KPIs. Let’s look specifically at how you can use KPIs to evaluate the success of your law firm’s email newsletter.
Distributions And Openings
The first two critical KPIs for law firm newsletters are very straightforward. Your distribution is simply the number of email newsletters you sent out during a particular campaign. This does not necessarily equal the number of newsletters that were actually delivered to recipients’ mailboxes (more on this later).
Your openings are the number of newsletters that were opened once they landed in the mailboxes. Some software programs will also show the mobile openings, telling you whether your newsletter is being read on a phone rather than on a computer.
You should see both the total number of newsletters opened and the open rate based on the number sent. Open rates are one of the most important KPIs for obvious reasons. Determining whether an open rate is good is a subjective call. Compare your open rates for each campaign to see which headlines or topics attract the most interest. And even if your rate is considered high by industry standards, remember that there’s always room for improvement.
Bounce Rate And Delivery Rate
Your bounce rate is the percentage of newsletters that were sent but not delivered to the intended recipient. They “bounced” back. The opposite of the bounce rate is the delivery rate, which shows the percentage of emails that arrived safely in the intended mailboxes.
Bounces indicate problems, of course, but to know whether a problem is one you can correct, you need to know which type of bounce you’re dealing with.
Soft Bounces
A soft bounce usually indicates that a message was not delivered due to a temporary problem. Often a newsletter will bounce when the recipient’s mailbox is full or the server is overloaded. Other reasons an email message will soft bounce include:
• The message is too large.
• The mailbox is inactive or not configured properly.
• The message is blocked due to content.
• The message doesn’t meet the recipient server’s policies, anti-spam requirements, anti-virus requirements or DMARC requirements for authentication.
If a marketing platform detects repeated soft bounces to the same address on subsequent campaigns, it will likely convert that address to a hard bounce.
A high soft bounce rate could indicate that your newsletter is being treated as spam, so it may help to review guidelines and adjust your content accordingly.
Hard Bounces
When it appears that the problem with an email address is permanent, messages to that address will hard bounce. Generally, a hard bounce indicates that an email address is not valid or that the recipient has blocked delivery.
Marketing platforms often delete addresses with hard bounces immediately, even though there are occasionally times when a legitimate email address will hard bounce for no reason.
Click-Through Rate And Click-To-Open Rate
Your click-through rate tells you the percentage of newsletter recipients who click on a link within it. Your click-to-open rate is the percentage of people who open your newsletter and then click on a link within it. Note that your CTOR is based on the number of people who open your newsletter rather than the number of newsletters you deliver, as your CTR is.
Pay attention to your click-to-open rate to determine the effectiveness of the subject line and first headers, as well as the design of the newsletter, since it’s only tracking people who actually viewed your email.
Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate tells you how many recipients took the opportunity to unsubscribe from your newsletters. Hopefully, your software or marketing company has collected reasons for their desire to unsubscribe.
Often people unsubscribe when they feel you are sending too many newsletters, so if you’re sending them at frequent intervals, you might try allowing more time between newsletters.
First Steps To Improving Your Newsletter Analytics
With an understanding of the ways to measure the success of your newsletter, you can begin to test what works best for your mailing list. Try running a series of experiments so you can uncover patterns that can lead to greater success. Here are some ideas:
• Test sending your newsletter on different days of the week and look for changes in the click-through rates. We’ve found that the best days to send a newsletter are Monday and Tuesday.
• The timing of your newsletter is important too. Test sending your email before working hours in your time zone and after working hours in your time zone. Avoid scheduling newsletters for the middle of the business day.
• Headlines are what readers see first. Try different styles: Ask a question, use buzzwords in all capital letters, write in all lowercase, state a fact or statistic and/or use the subscriber’s name.
In each of the tests above, save time to review the KPIs a week later. You will likely begin to notice patterns, and you can then implement them as your firm best practices for newsletter writing and scheduling.
Making The Most Of Your Newsletter Metrics
Understanding your newsletter KPIs is important, but improving them usually takes considerable practice. When you understand the types of email bounces and can compare your click-through rate and click-to-open rate, you can more effectively act on the data you’re seeing.
Your mailing list is unique to your firm, which means what works best for your firm will also be unique—there is no secret sauce. To start, determine the best day and time to send your newsletter, and then focus on finding the subject style that resonates with your audience the most.
These starting points can help you develop a formula that ultimately results in reaching more of your target audience and, hopefully, gaining more business.
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