Tracking your success

Keep track of how your campaign is doing by reviewing the campaign report:

What is tracked:

• Opens
• Clicks
• Bounces
• Unsubscribes
• SPAM

Opens:

Percentage of people who opened the email. Note: we can only calculate this number based on the number of people who displayed the image or who clicked on a link in the email. Your real open rate might be higher than the open rate reported because most email clients (Gmail, Outlook, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail…) don’t display images unless the sender is a “trusted sender” or the user clicks on the link to display images. Have more accurate rates by:

• Having many, smaller images
• Having several links
• Encouraging people to display images at the top of your email. A quick sentence like: “Not displaying the images? You’re missing out on the picture our latest arrival!” or “Experience this email to the fullest: display the images” helps a great deal.

Open Rate:

    (People who displayed images + People who clicked on a link)
    ______________________________________________________________
            Total number of people you sent your email to

Expected results: Between 15% – 40%

Variables:

• Relationship with the list: For example, an older, non-reconfirmed list will not perform nearly as well as a targeted campaign.
• Subject: Clear and explicit subjects will yield higher open rates.
• Multiplicity: A lot of links and small images

Clicks:

Percentage of people who clicked on one of the links in your email. Note: Your email should be short and succinct. People have a 15-20 second attention span when reading emails. Make sure you always have a few links linking to complementary information:

• Specific page on your website
• Your social media page
• A blog post

Click Rate:

    People who clicked on a link / Number of unique opens

Expected results: Between 3% – 10%

Variables:

• Purpose of the email: If you’re just wishing “Happy Holidays,” you might not get very many clicks
• Location of the link: if it’s hidden in the footer of your email, not many people will see it.
• Amount of information within the email: if it’s so long that people become disinterested, they won’t want to “read (even) more”

Bounce:

A bounce occurs when a campaign is not delivered to a recipient.

A “hard” bounce: the address no longer exists (worse, maybe it never existed… Did you send a confirmation email?) . If not addressed, these can have dramatic consequences to your account, sometimes going as far as getting it suspended. As a result, all hard bounces will be removed from the list. A “soft” bounce: the email is currently not available for a “temporary” reason. If there are 4 soft bounces on a single email address, the email address will be automatically removed from the list.

Note:

Your reports will provide you with very detailed information about the bounces on your emails, including several different types of bounces not listed above.

Why are emails removed from the list?

To avoid potential Spam complaints. It will also help in regards to future email statistics.

Bounce Rate:

    Total bounces / Total number of people you sent your email to

Expected Results:

0% – 0.5 %

Should always be less than 1%

Variables:

• How current is your list?

Unsubscribes:

A subscriber may no longer wish to receive emails from you. In this case, if they click on the ‘[UNSUBSCRIBE]’ link, they wilfully remove themselves from your list.

Total number of unsubscribed contacts  / Total number of people email was sent to

Understand that is much better for someone to unsubscribe than to flag you as spam.

SPAM:

The popular name for unsolicited commercial email. We can only measure the complaints for specific internet service providers. Use best practices to avoid complaints, test with SPAMAssassin and send a test to yourself (see where it lands) before sending out your campaign.

Total number of complaints / Total number of emails sent to specific internet service providers

As soon as someone marks you as spam, they are definitively removed from the list.