Key Benefits of Email Tracking Reports

August 19, 2016

As an email marketer, you probably don’t have time to meticulously analyze reports from email marketing campaigns. However, interpreting these stats can have huge benefits for your email marketing and doesn’t have to take all day.

Below are some of the metrics provided in the Email Tracking Report:

  1. Unique Open Count: the number of different subscribers who opened the message at least once
  2. Unique Click Count: the number of different subscribers who opened the message at least once
  3. Delivery Rate: the percentage of send messages that were successfully delivered
  4. Hardbounce Count: number of hard bounces that occurred for a permanent reason such as the email address does not exist anymore
  5. Softbounce Count: number of bounces that happened for a temporary reason such as a full mailbox, temporarily inactive, etc.
  6. Unique Unsubscribe Rate: percentage of subscribers who unsubscribed
  7. Spam Complaint Rate: percentage of subscribers who complained that the message was spam

Now that you have a basic understanding of these terms, let’s focus on how to use these stats to quickly improve your email marketing strategy.

Here are some common issues and some helpful hints to improve future campaigns.

Issue #1: The unique open rate is too low

If your open rate has been steadily decreasing, here are some good ideas to consider. The only things people see when deciding to open your message are the from address, subject line, and preview text. So studying and tweaking these variables will have a big impact on your open rates.

  • Take a look at the Statistical Charts report to see which of your subject lines are performing the best and worst. Then use try using key words in the successful subject lines in your future campaigns.
  • Run an A/B Test to see which from address or subject line performs best with your specific group of subscribers.
  • Use Critical Impact’s Preview Text tool to customize what text people see before opening the message in their inbox

In addition, the send timing and frequency of your send could be causing a low open rate. If you’ve been sending email for awhile, take a moment to see what time of day and day of week has been the most successful for your campaigns.

  • Open the Statistical Charts report to see which day of the week is performing best. You’ll be able to see which day of the week your emails have been getting the most opens in an easy to read graph.
  • Sort the email tracking reports by unique open rate. What time of day did you send out the messages with the highest open rates? Try targeting your subscribers at the most successful times of day.

Issue #2: Not enough people are clicking the links

To improve a low click rate, take a look at your reports to see where people are drawn to click the most.

  • Use a bold call-to-action: try adding a larger, attention grabbing call-to-action button and see if that helps your click through rate.
  • Run the Click Overlay report for recent campaigns to visually see where in the message your subscribers click the most. If the clicks usually occur at the top of the message, make sure to use this real estate for the most important content.
  • Write compelling content that explains the value of clicking on the call-to-action link. People are more likely to click if they see the value in clicking the link.

 In Summary

Knowing what to look for in your email marketing reports can help save you time and, when applied correctly, can drastically improve the response rate of future campaigns. We hope these tips helped you understand tracking reports a little better and made it a little easier improve your email marketing.