Setting goals

Goals let you turn a vague ambition like “grow the list” or “lift engagement” into a concrete, trackable target. You pick a metric and set a number to hit, and Letterhead tracks your progress automatically so your team always knows where things stand. Letterhead also works out goals from your own recent numbers and offers them to you, and when your team reaches a goal it celebrates and moves the goal on to the next one, so a goal never sits finished on the page.

Prefer to have it done for you?

The Letterhead assistant (early access — rolling out to select accounts) can set, check, or retarget goals for you in conversation — “set a goal to hit a 35% open rate”. See how the assistant works.

What you can set a goal on

A goal pairs a metric with a target value. You choose the metric from a set list, and the exact options depend on the goal’s scope. Goals live at three scopes: company-wide for overall performance, brand for a single newsletter brand, and channel for an individual newsletter. A goal’s scope is set by the Goals view you add it from, and you can run goals at all three scopes at once so leadership and individual editors are each tracking the targets that matter to them.

Common examples:

• Subscriber growth — e.g., reach 10,000 total subscribers
• Open rate — e.g., lift your average open rate to 35%
• Click rate or engagement — e.g., hit a 10% click rate on a channel

Which metrics you can choose

The metric list depends on the goal’s scope:

• Channel — Open Rate, Click Rate, Click-to-Open Rate, Total Subscribers, New Subscribers (monthly), Loyalists, New & Engaged, and Ghosts.
• Company — Contacts, Active Readers (30d), Active Clickers (30d), Monthly Net Growth, and New Subscribers (monthly).
• Brand — Contacts, Monthly Net Growth, and New Subscribers (monthly).

Goals Letterhead suggests for you

When your newsletter has enough history, the Goals card offers one goal worked out from your own numbers, under the heading Suggested for you. Nothing in it comes from other publishers: the target sits where your own good sends already land.

• A rate goal — open rate first, then click rate — needs four recent sends to at least 300 people: a newsletter’s last eight sends, or a company’s last eight weeks. The card shows what is usual for you (a typical send) and suggests a target where your better sends already land, held between 5% and 15% above usual so it is neither a formality nor a leap.
• A growth goal — Contacts for a company, Total Subscribers for a newsletter — needs six months of audience history and a list that is growing. It shows where you are now and suggests a target about a month of your usual growth away, rounded to a number you would write down yourself.

Each suggestion says in one line why that target is within reach and one thing you can try to get there. Choose Add goal to take it as it is, Show me another to see the next one, or Adjust to change it before adding:

• Choose a target — Steady (a usual send or month for you), Stretch (recommended: where your best recent sends land, or a good month of growth), or Bold (your best recent result).
• How it counts — for a rate goal, Reach it or Keep it (below). A growth goal counts once the number is passed, so it is always a reach goal.

A metric that already has a goal is not suggested again, and a newsletter with too little history or a list that isn’t growing simply sees no suggestion.

Reach it or keep it

A goal on a rate counts in one of two ways, shown as a Reach or Keep chip next to the metric on its card:

• Reach it — the goal is reached once you hold the number on four sends in a row (four weeks in a row for a company goal). One lucky send doesn’t count. Until then the card says how many of your last four sends were at or above the target.
• Keep it — a standing line rather than a finish line, for a rate you want to stay above on every send. The card shows your streak (“Held for 6 sends in a row”) or says when you slipped (“Below it on your last send”). A keep goal is never “reached”, so it never celebrates or moves on.

Goals you added before these options existed count as reach goals.

Your first milestones

A company that has sent fewer than four newsletters sees its first milestones on the Goals card instead of a suggestion: Send your first newsletter and Get your first 10 clicks (unique clicks, counted the same way your newsletter reports count them). Once a few more editions have gone out, goals worked out from your own sends take their place.

Set a goal

1. Open the company, brand, or channel whose Goals page you want to add a goal to.
2. Choose Add goal.
3. In the Add a goal dialog, fill in the two fields:
   • Metric — pick what to track; the available metrics depend on the goal’s scope (see the list above).
   • Target — the number you want to reach. The field adapts to the metric — a percentage for rates, a whole number for counts.
4. Select Add goal to save it.

A goal’s scope is set by where you add it: add one from the company Goals page for a company-wide target, from a brand’s page for that brand, or from a channel’s page for a single newsletter.

Set multiple goals

You can add goals at different scopes and run them side by side:

• A company-wide goal for overall newsletter performance
• Brand-level goals for each newsletter brand
• Channel-specific goals for individual newsletters

Track progress on the Goals page

Every goal appears on the Goals page, which gives you a centralized view of all your performance targets and tracks your progress toward reaching them.

Access the page

Open the company, brand, or channel you want to see goals for — each opens to its Goals page. What you see is scoped to where you are: the company page shows company goals, and a brand or channel page shows that brand’s or channel’s goals.

Goal cards

Each goal appears as a card showing:

• The current value
• The metric it tracks
• A status indicator. A count goal such as Contacts reads Above goal, Below goal, or Close; for lower-is-better metrics like Ghosts, this reads Under limit or Over limit instead. A rate goal is read over your recent sends: a reach goal reads Working toward it, On pace (at least half of your last four sends met it), or Reached, and a keep goal reads Holding with its streak or Slipped.
• A short context line — how far you are above or below your target, the percentage of the way there, or how many of your last four sends met it
• The target you set, with a Reach or Keep chip on a rate goal saying how it counts

Each card’s status tells you at a glance whether you’re above, below, or close to a goal, so you can catch the ones that are falling behind. Check in regularly to see which goals are on track and which need attention.

Delete or change a goal

Goals don’t have an edit mode. To remove a goal, select the X in the corner of its card — it’s removed right away, with no confirmation step. To change a target, delete the goal and add it again with the new number. The one exception is a goal you have just reached, whose celebration (below) lets you set the next target in a click.

When you reach a goal

The first time you open Letterhead after your team reaches a goal, a short celebration opens where that goal lives — the company Home page for a company goal, the channel’s page for a channel goal. Everyone on the team sees it once, within two weeks of the goal being reached; someone who joined the team after that day doesn’t, since they didn’t work toward it. It shows the number you held and how far you came over the last four sends.

It then offers the next goal, so you can keep going without opening the editor:

• Ready for the next one? — your own Stretch target for the same metric (recommended), worked out from your recent sends or growth, or the same number kept as a standing goal if there’s no stretch target above it.

If nobody picks the next goal within a