Analytics
Measuring the success of your emails using metrics and reporting
After your email is sent, you’ll want to evaluate your campaign. Evaluating how your email performed is important because it helps you determine the success of your campaign and whether it achieved its objectives. Metrics and reporting are powerful ways to evaluate how your emails did and help you improve your future email campaigns.
Depending on your goal, the metrics that you want to use, and the metrics that are most important to you may differ slightly, but there are some universal metrics that can be used to judge a campaign’s success.
On this page:
Engagement Metrics
Open Rate (OR)
The open rate is the number of unique opens, divided by the number of emails sent, minus those bounced.
Keep in mind that there are a number of reasons why open rates may be inaccurate. For example, with the launch of iOS15, Apple also launched Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) - an opt-in feature for all iOS users that impacts email tracking. MPP prevents senders from knowing when recipients open an email, and masks their IP address so it cannot be linked to other online activity or geographical location. This means that Open Rate and geotargeting are less reliable. The open rate, in particular, may appear inflated, so it’s highly recommended to use alternative metrics (such as click thru rate) in addition to OR when judging a campaign’s success.
Even if they may not be completely accurate, open rates can still give you a good idea of your engagement over time. Common factors in low, or decreasing open rates are:
- Sending too many, or too few, campaigns.
- Subject lines that fail to grab people's interest.
- Sending one-size-fits-all content instead of targeting different subscriber segments.
If you notice that your open rate is decreasing, you may need to consider revising your content or sending frequency.
Click Thru Rate (CTR)
The click thru rate is another important measure of engagement, since it measures how many people clicked on a hyperlink, call-to-action (CTA), or image within your email’s content. CTR is calculated by dividing the number of recipients who have clicked a link by the number of emails delivered (which is those sent minus those that bounced).
CTR is a good indicator of what percentage of your audience is interested in your content over time. Monitoring your CTR you can help you gauge:
- Overall reader interest or email fatigue
- Email content (written and visual)
- Link placement
- Link count
- Media type
Delivery Metrics
Bounce Rate
Bounced emails are emails that were not delivered. There are two types of bounced emails:
- Soft bounces
- These are temporary delivery failures. An email may soft bounce if the recipient's mailbox is full; the receiving server is down or swamped with messages; the message size is too large; the recipient's settings do not allow for an email from the sender; suspicious or spammy content has been detected, and many more reasons.
- Hard bounces
- These are permanent delivery failures. An email may hard bounce if the recipient's email address is invalid or no longer in use.
The bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of bounced emails by the total number of recipients.
Low bounce rates indicate a healthy list with active and engaged subscribers, whereas high bounce rates indicate there may be problems with the way your list has grown or how it is being managed. It is important to keep your bounce rate as low as possible because email providers and anti-spam networks monitor bounce rates for every campaign you send and use that information to decide if they'll accept mail from the U of A in the future.
Some things that you can do to keep your bounce rate low include:
- Make sure that your lists are kept up to date. Lists at the U of A are always changing - students graduate, people change jobs, or they may leave the U of A entirely. Keeping your lists up to date helps to prevent emails from being sent to invalid email addresses.
- Make sure that there are no typos in the email addresses being used in your lists.
Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate is a measure of how many people are opting out of receiving any more emails from you. You should aim to keep your unsubscribe rate less than 2%.
Here are some things that you can do if you have high unsubscribe rates:
- Check your email segmentation. If the email is irrelevant to your audience, more contacts than normal may unsubscribe.
- Make sure that your contacts want to receive your emails. This usually means sending to contacts who have opted in to receive your emails. Recipients are more likely to unsubscribe or mark as spam if they are not expecting to receive emails from you.
Registrations
If you are sending an email for an event, you may want to use the number of registrations that have come through via email. This would require the use of a unique registration link for each channel of promotion.
Traffic
Often, for an email campaign the main goal is to direct readers to a certain webpage. This can also be measured with CTR for clicks to that specific link, but you can also view additional information about this traffic with the help of UTMs and Google Analytics.
A UTM (or Urchin Tracking Module) is a snippet of text that appears at the end of a link that includes tracking information that will pass the information on to Google Analytics about where that user has come from. UTMs typically consist of source, medium, and campaign information. It's important to note for email, the medium should always be ‘email’. Source refers to which tool you are using (Campaign Monitor, Mailist, etc.), and campaign refers to the specific email being sent. UTMs are auto-generated in Campaign Monitor but must be manually added during the email build for Mailist. For reporting on traffic, please submit a request to the Digital Strategy team.