When you send a campaign, our system collects the engagement results for that mailing in the Response tab. Each mailing has its own response breakdown with an overview section and separate tabs for opens, clicks, shares, new signups, and opt-outs. Each of these metrics are tracked at the recipient level once your mailing reaches a contact’s inbox.
About response data
Most marketing emails are opened within the first 48-72 hours after the email was sent, so it’s expected that the bulk of your response data will fall within that time. However, those totals will continue to adjust even after the 48-72 hour window.
Response data, especially bounces and deliveries, can take up to 30 hours to finish processing, so be sure to give your mailing plenty of time before considering any of the results official.
Compare mailings, Export, and Save as PDF
At the very top of a mailing’s response data, there are three buttons: Compare mailings, Export responses, and Save as PDF. The Compare mailings button will direct you to the Compare mailings tool, which you can read more about here. The Export responses button allows you to export the mailing’s response data as a zipped CSV, which you can read more about here. The Save as PDF button allows you to export the mailing’s response data or webview as a PDF, which you can read more about here.
Opens
Opens refers to 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 undelivered emails are not used in this calculation. The open rate is a good indicator of general engagement and many use it to prove the effectiveness of their subject line split tests. Based on how we calculate open rates, the open rates in Insights and Response may slightly differ.
Open and click-through rates can vary wildly depending 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.
Trackable opens
Opens are trackable 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.
For contacts who receive the plaintext version, opens are trackable when they click on 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. When that happens, the open and the click will be tracked on the Response page.
Non-trackable opens
Opens are not trackable when:
- An email is opened, but images are blocked in the email client
- A contact receives the plaintext version, but doesn’t click on any links
- A contact views an email offline or 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.
Clicks
Clicks refers to the number of unique clicks and total clicks in your campaign.
Clicks are broken into two categories: unique clicks and total clicks. Unique clicks exclude members clicking the same links multiple times; whereas total clicks account for multiple clicks. Any trackable link in your mailing will appear in the Click analysis section found on the Overview tab. For a more detailed breakdown of the total number of clicks for each specific link in your campaign, head 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.
At the top of the Clicks tab, there is a dropdown menu. By default, the dropdown menu shows the number of total clicks and the number of unique clicks for all links. The unique clicks shown here is the number of unique clicks on the mailing. To see the number of unique clicks on a particular link, click on the dropdown menu to expand it and select the link in question.
Seeing links with [Outlook button] in the list?
The Clicks tab in a mailing’s response, shows clicks on buttons separately when clicked by a contact in Outlook on a Windows device. This is caused by the way that Outlook on Windows responds to our link redirects, which is how we track clicks. Because of this, in the Clicks tab, you may see three entries for one button: one for the plaintext version, one for the HTML version, and one for Outlook buttons. These three entries are combined on the Overview page, but separated on the Clicks page to allow for more granular review.
For more information about click types and tracking, please refer to this article.
Shares
Shares refers to the number of email recipients who shared the campaign using the legacy* social sharing feature.
The Shares tab shows you who has shared your campaign via email or social networks using the legacy* social sharing feature. You can look at your total shares broke down by network, as well as the traffic that came from views on social media. If you created your campaign in the drag and drop editor, then this section will not contain any data.
New sign-ups
New sign-ups refers to the number of new people who subscribed using the signup link at the bottom of the campaign.
The default email footer contains 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 signup, we track it as part of the new signups total on the Response page for that particular mailing.
Opt-outs
Opt-outs refers to the number of contacts who have unsubscribed from your audience list through 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. When someone clicks on the opt-out link at the bottom of your mailing, they are immediately moved to the Opt-out status and removed from the 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.
Machine activity
Machine activity refers to the opens and clicks that can be attributed to Apple MPP and other non-human interactions, such as server sniffing.
The Machine activity tab shows you the Apple MPP open rate, the machine open rate, and the machine click rate. As currently built, this data will not be available in response exports, Insights, response-based segments, or via the API response endpoints.
Apple MPP open rate
Apple Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user, to prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location. Any subscriber who uses the native Apple Mail application to read their email, whether they use an iPhone, an iPad, or a Mac, is able to turn these features on.
Apple MPP pre-fetches images ahead of the user opening the email message, regardless of whether or not they open it or delete it. When a user opts in to Mail Privacy Protection, they’re allowing Apple to pre-fetch (or download) emails and email images to their device. This takes place whether or not the user decides to open and read the email message. Email image pixels, which indicate opens and open rates, are included in this pre-loading. This means an email may be marked as open even though the user did not open or read it.
This metric shows the number and percentage of messages sent in a campaign that were pre-cached by Apple MPP. If a message is later visibly read by the recipient, the message is still counted here to show that it was initially pre-cached by Apple MPP.
Apple MPP tracking began on September 18, 2023 at 7:00 pm US Central time. For any mailings sent prior to that date, Apple MPP-related data before that time is unavailable.
Machine opens and clicks
Machine opens and clicks typically occur when a receiving server checks a mailing and its links for security purposes. This is sometimes called server sniffing and can result in an open or click rate that’s higher than expected. The machine opens and machine clicks metrics show the number and percentade of opens or clicks that originated from a non-human source to help you see how many of your opens or clicks come from the server checking process, rather than directly from your contacts. Apple MPP opens are not included in machine opens.
The data for machine clicks and machine opens are only available for mailings sent after June 11, 2024.
Excluded
Excluded refers to the number of contacts who were excluded from the campaign.
When sending a campaign, you have the option to exclude contacts in your audience by checking the Exclude an audience segment box. This allows you to select only one segment to be excluded from your mailing. When you choose an exclusion segment, it creates an Excluded tab in the Response data for that mailing. 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.
If you excluded a segment and see that the response data says that only one person was excluded, don’t be alarmed. When that happens, the “one” exclusion refers to the segment as a whole, not the number of contacts in it. Rest assured, the full segments-worth of contacts were correctly excluded from the mailing.