Curated by Vinod Kumar Jain & Amit Jain · All Frontier Global · free, no login
A newsletter's economics are one chain of multiplications and most of the links are guesses until you measure them. Enter the subscribers, the three rates and what a conversion is worth, with your costs, and this returns the monthly value, the return on cost, and the subscriber count at which it breaks even. Funnel rates vary wildly — by list, by sector, by how the list was built. Measure your own.
Value per send = conversions × value per conversion · Monthly value = value per send × sends per month
ROI = (monthly value − monthly cost) ÷ monthly cost × 100
Value per subscriber per month = monthly value ÷ subscribers
Break-even subscribers = monthly cost ÷ value per subscriber per month — the list size at which the newsletter pays for itself at your rates
Honest limits
No benchmark rates are embedded, and none should be. Open, click and conversion rates differ by an order of magnitude between lists, and published industry averages mostly measure how the averaging was done. Your own last three sends are better data than any benchmark.
Open rate is the least trustworthy number in the chain. Privacy features that pre-fetch images inflate it and blocked images deflate it, so it drifts from what it claims to measure. Click-through is the sturdier signal.
Multiplying four estimates compounds four errors. If each rate is off by a third, the answer can be out by a factor of three. Run it twice — once pessimistically — and treat the gap as the real answer.
Value per conversion is doing most of the work and is the hardest to pin down. Use contribution rather than revenue, and be careful about crediting a conversion to the newsletter that would have happened anyway.
Sources
None. No industry benchmark, platform average or sector rate is embedded, fetched or implied — every rate in the funnel is one you entered from your own data.