Explanation of key email campaigns stats

Explanation of key email campaigns stats

Unique Opens
Opens by separate people, so if 10 people out of 100 open the email the rate is 10%, regardless of how many times they open the email.

Look at ways to improve open rates:
  • Improved subject line
  • Relevant content
  • Use of segments and even sub segments to increase content interest
  • Send day and time, eg. Wednesday mornings are reckoned to be best, Friday night worst etc, suggest trying different days and times

Clicks/Opens
Number of clicks or click rate of the opened emails, not the entire list, so if you have 406 subscribers reading the email, 25 of them clicked something, so the click/open rate was 6.2%, this would be pretty good - norm is 3-5%.

Open rates are somewhat misleading as you cannot control people's email setup, browser settings etc., and an open does not really necessarily mean the recipient read the content.  But a click is a definite show of interest.


Unique Clicks
Clicks by separate people from the whole list, so if 10 people out of 100 click a link in the email the unique click rate is 10%, regardless of how many times they click the same link.

So if the campaign had 3173 subscribers and 25 separate people clicked a link, the Unique Click rate is 0.8%. 

If you are starting your campaigns and building business data areas to be addressed first are the open rate and clicks per opens.

As an example, if you ran a campaigns most likely to be of interest to a nationality of subscriber, say Canadian, then you could create a 'nationality' field in your CRM, then build a segment in Campaigns called Nationality, which filters as 'Nationality' = 'Canadian', then target such an email to Canadians only... then this might be most relevant to those people and thus:

- the Open rate would increase
- the Clicks/Opens would increase
- would result in a segment with fewer people but a higher Unique click rate

In email marketing, it is important to avoid the temptation to think that list size is the most important thing, actually 'small is big' and with a more focussed list your content is more relevant and the stats will be better.