The moment you send out a new campaign, the response results for that mailing will immediately start building on the Response page in your account. The page will open to the Overview tab, and offers five additional tabs for Opens, Clicks, Shares, New sign-ups, and Opt-outs. Each of these metrics are tracked at the recipient level once your email reaches that person’s inbox, and we’ll go over each of them below.
Response page data
Due to the fact that the majority of marketing emails are opened within the 48-72 hours after the emails have been sent, most of your response data will occur within that time, but those totals will continue to tabulate for days. For example, bounces (shown on the Overview tab) take at least 24 hours to finish processing, so be sure to give your campaign plenty of time before considering any of the Response results as official.
Opens
Is the number of people who opened your campaign in a trackable way
The open rate is calculated by dividing the total number of emails opened by the number of emails that were successfully delivered. That means that bounces or any emails that are not delivered are not used in this calculation. The open rate is a good indication of general engagement, and many use it to prove the effectiveness of their subject line tests. Based on how we calculate open rates, insight and response open rates may slightly differ.
Opens that are tracked:
- When someone views the HTML version of your mailing (including the images). In most cases, this means simply opening the email since all of our predesigned and blank templates are HTML by default.
- When someone receives the plaintext version and visits at least one of your links. Since there are no images in the plaintext version, we can only track an open if a link in the plaintext version is clicked. If that happens, the open and the click will be tracked on the Response page.
Opens that aren’t tracked:
- If the email is opened but images are blocked by default in the email client, the open won’t count unless the recipient clicks to download those images.
- If someone receives the plaintext version and doesn’t do anything with it. Since there are no images in the plaintext version, we have no way to track if the campaign has been opened unless it has a link in the content that has been clicked.
- If someone views an email offline or if someone views a limited-HTML version that doesn’t contain the images. In these circumstances, it would be probable that your true open rate is higher than can be reported (by us or anyone), and that some people who won’t appear in your open list have indeed opened and seen your mailing.
Open and click-through rates can vary wildly based on your organization, your industry, the kind of campaigns you send, and the kind of audience you’re sending to. Most industry reports place positive open rates between 15-25% for consumer-oriented mailings, but those numbers can vary by industry and all the other aforementioned factors. Our advice is to experiment with things like subject lines, message content, and frequency, then see how all of your response numbers stack up against the only benchmarks that truly matter — your own.
Clicks
Represent the number of unique clicks and total clicks in your campaign
Clicks are broken into two categories: unique and total clicks. Unique clicks exclude members clicking the same links multiple times; whereas total clicks account for the multiple clicks.
Any trackable link in your mailing will appear in the campaign response’s Click Analysis section (found on the Overview tab) including any links that stem from your template header (like a logo that links to your website) or footer.
For an overview of the total clicks in your mailing, you would check the Click Analysis. But for a more detailed breakdown of the total number of clicks for each specific link in your campaign, you would go to the Clicks tab. Once there, if you click on a link’s name, the link will open in a new browser window, to remind you where this link routed.
Shares
Is the number of email recipients who shared the campaign
The shares tab shows you who has shared your campaign via email or social networks in a trackable way.
You can look at your total shares broke down by network, as well as the traffic that came from views on social media.
New sign-ups
The number of new people who subscribed using the sign-up link at the bottom of the campaign
At the bottom of your campaign template is a link that allows people to sign up if they received your email as a forward or saw it posted on a social network and would like to receive your future emails directly. If someone uses that link to sign-up, we track it as part of the new sign-ups total on the Response page for that particular campaign.
Opt-outs
The number of contacts who have opted out of your audience list from the campaign
Should someone desire to leave your email list, the self-removal process is instant and permanent, which is why an opt-out link is hard-coded in the footer of all of our templates. They click the opt-out link at the bottom of your mailing, and voila, they’re immediately set to Opt-out status and removed from Active status in your audience.
Our opt-out process, called TrueRemove®, acts as an independent service that instantly and permanently removes contacts from your active audience. It protects your subscribers, and it protects you.
Excluded
The number of contacts who have been excluded from the campaign
During the campaign creation process on the Review & Send page, you will have the option to exclude select contacts in your audience by checking the Exclude an audience segment box, which allows you to select only one segment. Doing so will then create an Excluded tab in the Response data for the mailing that will list the excluded contacts. However, exclusions will trump any other type of sending, so if you select to send to a group, then exclude a segment and a contact exists in both, that contact will be excluded from the mailing.