Compare reader groups across your newsletters

Your Dashboard’s Audience tab sorts everyone who reads you into five groups by how they engage. You can open any one of those groups and see it newsletter by newsletter — but until now, answering “which of my newsletters is holding on to its loyal readers, and which is quietly going quiet?” meant opening one group, writing the numbers down, and opening the next.

Now you can pick several groups and read them side by side in one table.

Where to find it

Go to Analytics → Dashboard and open the Audience tab, with all your newsletters in view rather than a single one. Below the metric cards you’ll find the five reader groups.

The five reader groups

• Loyalists — engaged with 3 or more of your last 5 issues.
• New & Engaged — subscribed in the last 30 days and engaged with at least one issue.
• Casual — everyone else: they’ve engaged with something recently, just not consistently. New subscribers who haven’t engaged yet sit here for their first 30 days.
• Fading — not new, not a Ghost, but engaged with none of your last 3 issues.
• Ghosts — engaged (opened or clicked) with none of your last 10 issues, and subscribed for more than 30 days.

Everyone lands in exactly one group, and the groups are worked out fresh from how people are actually reading — you don’t build or name them.

Compare two or more

Click a group to select it, then click another to add it to the comparison. Click a selected group again to drop it. You can have all five up at once, which is every group there is.

With two or more selected, you get a table of your newsletters:

• One row per newsletter, biggest list first.
• Subscribers — how many people that newsletter reaches.
• One column per group you selected, showing that group’s share of that newsletter’s list.

Because every column is a share of the same list, the columns read straight across against each other: a newsletter that’s 40% Loyalists and 5% Ghosts is in good shape, and one that’s the other way round is telling you something. A newsletter appears in the table if at least one of your selected groups is present in it — so a list that’s all Loyalists and no Ghosts still shows up, which is usually the row you came to find.

Select just one group and you get the single-group view instead, which has more room to spend on one group: alongside the share, it carries the number of people and an arrow showing which way that group is moving. Deselect everything and the table steps aside until you pick again.

What to do with it

• Put Loyalists next to Fading to see which newsletters are converting new readers into regular ones, and which are losing them.
• Put Ghosts next to Subscribers to find the lists carrying the most dead weight — the best candidates for a re-engagement send or a clean-up.
• Put New & Engaged across your newsletters after a growth push, to see where the new arrivals actually landed and whether they stuck around.

Related

• Audience metrics dashboard
• Track engagement over time for any audience segment
• Smart Engagement-Based Segments
• Letterhead list cleanup