Are you new to email marketing? Would you like help evaluating your email marketing efforts?

That’s why I’m here. You can hire me to work on your email marketing campaign, but I know that doesn’t work for everyone. So everyone else can continue to read this blog and this post specifically for help.

Below is a piece of an iContact report I copied to help explain the individual pieces of an email report:

This shows the most important stats that you want to look at on all your emails. Let’s walk through each one:

• Open Rate – “Opened” above refers to people who opened your email. They saw the subject, and clicked it to read the full email. They may or may not have read the full text, but it was at least exposed to them. In this case, 13% of total recipients opened the email. A good subject line can increase the open rate, and subject line tests should always use the open rate as the barometer for measuring a winner.
  
  
• Bounce Rate – “Bounced” above refers to an email address that was not able to be delivered, either because of the email address does not exist, was not correct, or some other error. A simple way to think about it is like an undeliverable address for postal mail. Keeping this low is important for your sender reputation. You can do this by cleaning your lists before uploading and sending, and never buying a list from a third-party. In the sample above, 1.7% of the email addresses on that list were not deliverable.
  
  
• No Info – Easy, this is the number of people who have not taken any action on the email. They email got to them (maybe in their spam folder) but they haven’t opened it.
  
  
• Click-thru Rate – “Clicked” above refers to those recipients who not only read the email, but clicked on at least one of the links in your email. In the sample above, 139 people clicked at least one link. And combined, those people clicked 182 times/links. If there is more than one link in an email, I might click them all. Hence the difference in numbers. You want to drive this number up. 1% is okay, but it can be much better.
  
  
• Unsubscribed – This is the number of people on the list who clicked unsubscribe on this email. Obviously here we’re looking to keep the numbers as low as possible.
  
  
• Forwarded – Just what it sounds like, this is the number of people who received your email and forwarded it to someone else.
  
  
• Complained – Not only were these people upset enough to unsubscribe, they reported your email as spam. A high complaint rate is the fastest way to get yourself “blacklisted” as an email sender. If you get blacklisted, you will have a lot of trouble sending emails to customers. At all costs, avoid this. Keep an eye on this number and if it starts to tick up, you’ll need to change something about the email content, frequency, or how you get the names on your list.

I hope that was helpful!

Remember, if you ever have a question about email marketing, you can ask me here.