A glossary of newsletter terms

Audience

• Subscriber — anyone on your list, free or paid.
• Member — on Ghost, a subscriber with an account; members can be free or paid.
• Segment — a subset of your list, such as paid members or readers in one region.

Sending

• Open rate — the share of delivered emails that were opened. Increasingly approximate because of privacy features.
• Click rate — the share of delivered emails where at least one link was clicked.
• Bounce — an email that could not be delivered. Hard bounces are permanent; soft bounces are temporary.
• Deliverability — whether email reaches the inbox rather than spam.

Money

• CPM — cost per thousand subscribers, a common way to price sponsorships.
• Churn — the share of paying subscribers who cancel in a given period.
• MRR — monthly recurring revenue from subscriptions.
• Comp — complimentary paid access given without payment.

Content

• Evergreen — content that stays useful for a long time, such as guides and templates.
• Paywall — the point in a post where content is limited to members or paid members.
• Archive — the web collection of past issues.