The performance tab in Email Campaigns allows you to track the performance of your emails by providing information on a series of metrics. But you can’t take full advantage of this feature if you’re unclear on how to interpret performance metrics data.
This article takes you step-by-step through each metric, with the help of numerical examples, to help you interpret performance data in order to improve the quality and efficiency of your email campaigns.
These are the main metrics the performance tab provides information on:
- Reach
- Open rate
- Click rate and unsubscribes
- Invalid emails
Read on to find how to interpret each of these.
1. Reach
According to the screenshot, the reach is 69%, or 463/672.
This means that 672 people were sent the email, out of which 463 received it in their inboxes.
To calculate this in percentage terms, 463 (number of people reached) is divided by 672 (total number of people on the mailing list), and multiplied by 100, resulting in 69%. This means 69% of your audience was reached by this email campaign.
Similarly, the number of people not reached would then be 672 - 463, which is 209. So out of 672 people who were sent the email, 209 did not receive it in their inboxes, and they make up 31% of the total number of people on your mailing list.
Reach is important to know, because it helps you weed out invalid emails, unsubscribed email addresses, and any technical issues in your email campaign. That said, the PosterMyWall email marketing platform will also filter out emails found to be invalid after you've sent your email. If you use the mailing list again, invalid emails will automatically get excluded.
2. Open rate
According to the screenshot, the open rate is 13%, or 62/463.
This means that 463 people received the email (as established earlier), out of which 62 opened it.
To calculate this in percentage terms, 62 (number of people who opened the email) is divided by 463 (number of people who received the email), and multiplied by 100, resulting in 13%. This means 13% of the people who received the email opened it.
Similarly, the number of people who did not open the email would then be 463 - 62, which is 401. And the percentage for this would be 100% - 13%, which is 87%. So out of 463 people who received the email, 401 did not open it, and they make up 87% of the total number of people who received the email.
It is important for you to know the open rate for your emails, so you can figure out how to make them more appealing, and more likely to be opened, by tweaking things like the subject and preview text.
3. Click rate and unsubscribes
This section of performance metrics looks at both the click rate, and the number of people who unsubscribed from your emails.
According to the screenshot, the click rate is 31%, or 19/62.
This means that 62 people opened the email (as established earlier), out of which 19 clicked on any unique clickable links in it.
To calculate this in percentage terms, 19 (number of people who clicked on links within the email) is divided by 62 (number of people who opened the email), and multiplied by 100, resulting in 31%. This means 31% of the people who opened the email clicked on one or more of the links in it.
The other metric in this section is the number of people who unsubscribed from your emails via the email whose metrics you are looking at currently. This is fairly simple and shows the number of people who unsubscribed out of the total number of people who opened the email.
So here, 8 people out of the 62 who opened the email unsubscribed to further emails from you, which is 13%.
It is important to know click rates and unsubscribes for your emails, since these show you how engaging, interactive, relevant, or, conversely, how boring and irrelevant your email content is. You can then work on improving your strategy accordingly.
4. Invalid emails
This is another metric you can check to make your audience/mailing list more efficient. Invalid email addresses are different from unsubscribed email addresses. These are email addresses which did not even receive your email (see the section on Reach in this article).
Remove any invalid email addresses a particular mailing list may have by clicking ‘Remove all’ and selecting from the list. This way you can improve your reach. Once discovered, invalid emails present in your mailing lists will be excluded from being sent emails.
To learn more about how to measure your email campaign's metrics, watch the video below:
You can also download the performance report for your email campaigns or mailing lists in CSV (for both campaigns and mailing list reports) or PDF (only for campaign reports) formats by clicking on the 'Download report' button in the performance tab.