In a library meeting yesterday with a consultant: “So this newsletter you send out, how many people receive the email?”
“Twenty thousand, but only seven thousand open it.”
“Wow, that’s a great open rate.”
In June, WordPress tweaked their stats page… again. I’m a bit perplexed by how often I open WordPress and find things different. Remember last winter when they made it so you couldn’t like a post while browsing a tag? You had to at least open a post (and preferably read it) before you could like it. I appreciate that. I’m forever frustrated when I open WordPress and see my notification dot, but when I click the bell, I see that BestKetoRecipies liked a post that no one read that day.
I suppose WordPress got gobs of complaints, “Hey, no one is liking my posts anymore!” They undid that fix in about a month. The change in June was interesting. Suddenly my stats page shows me how many of my subscription emails are sent and opened. My last post, Mayonnaise Vignette, went to 2,300 subscribers. Of those, 803 opened it. Hmmm, that’s thirty-five percent, just like the library. Maybe that’s not impressive. Maybe it’s just the industry standard.
Know what those 803 people got? They got my post title and the first three lines of text—and then a link that says Read more of this post. If they click the link, they travel to my blog. But no one does that. Well, actually five or six people usually do. One time twenty-seven did, but I have no idea why. The rest just open the email, and then I guess they delete it. I often wonder about that. If they aren’t going to read the post, why waste the time to open the email. There’s no mystery about what it is. A couple of these emails arrive every week. “Oh look, I got a post from The Other Stuff. Now I can open the email just to delete it. I’ve been looking forward to doing this all week.”
Until 2017, my entire blogpost emailed out to my subscribers. But I became frustrated by how few people visited my blog. And why would they visit, I reasoned, they already read the post. I figured if I sent out a three-line teaser, everyone would click through to read the rest of the post. But, like I already said, they don’t.
My blogging goals have changed since 2017. Now, instead of drawing people to my blog, I just want to be read. I publish in a variety of places: my blog, newspapers, news websites, online periodicals, and the library newsletter. Often, a piece shows up in more than one location. I have no idea how many people read each of my posts. But I like feeling widely read, even if I can’t quantify it. I figure if I make it easier on the 2,300 people who get emails from me, I can pretend more people read my posts.
For my first emailed post, I wanted to create a beautiful creative nonfiction story, but this fact-based post is what sprung from my fingers. Sorry, maybe next time. If you’re so inclined, let me know what you think of getting the whole post emailed to you. Did it change how you read the post? Did it encourage you to read the post when you typically delete it? Or are you like me, and you’ve opted out of all email subscriptions and only read blogs from the WordPress reader.
Regardless, thanks for reading.
Edited: Sigh, that didn’t work. The feed only sent out the first three lines again. Back to the drawing board.
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Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
