Typical Email Campaign Stats and What They Mean
Let's go over some typical email campaign stats, and how email marketers should use them. These are stats you'll find in Segnant Mailer campaign reports, but you'll find them in any decent email marketing service.
Total Sent
This one's pretty obvious. It's basically the number of emails sent in this campaign. Not all deliveries will be successful, though...
Total Views
This is a stat with lots of "wow" factor, but don't let it get to your head. Your email might have been opened 10,000 times, and that sounds really cool. But what if it was just one guy (a guy with way too much time on his hands) who opened your email 10,000 times? That's pretty extreme, but you get the gist. It's not a totally useless stat. For example, if you sell banner advertisements in your email campaigns, then an open is an impression, and you want to show total impressions (even if one of your recipients is a whacko).
Total Unique Views
This is a more accurate stat. It tells you how many individuals opened your campaign. So if two (very sad, very lonely) people opened your campaigns 500 times each, that would be 1,000 total opens. This stat would show, "2 recipients opened" which is a lot more useful to email marketers.
Total Un-subscriptions
If any email campaign stat is capable of bringing a tear to your eye, this is the one. We've seen average unsubscribe rates of less than half of one percent. Anything above that means you did something to make a lot of people very angry at you.
Total Click-throughs
This is the total number of clicks your email got. It's handy in determining how much overall web traffic you'll get to your website after a campaign is sent. For instance, it might be nice to know that "after every email marketing campaign I send, our website gets about 100,000 visits."
Unique Click-throughs
This stat counts how many times your recipients clicked on links inside your email campaign, minus any duplicate clicks. So if some weirdo clicked on 2 different links 500 times each, we tell you that you had 2 unique clicks.
Total Online Views
This stat tells how many recipients actually visited your email/newsletter on the web. This could mean that these recipients had faced difficulty in viewing your email in their email program.
Times forwarded
Segnant Mailer lets you insert a link into your email campaign that allows your recipient to forward a copy of your campaign to a friend. We'll actually track how many times the email was forwarded using this link. Note that we do not track who your emails were forwarded to, and we certainly don't add them to your mailing list. And we can't tell if you forward a campaign from your own email account. That would be evil.
Total Bounced Emails
When you send a campaign, you get bouncebacks. Bounce in simple terms means that the email fails to reach at recipient's inbox. There are two types of bounces you should know about. A "Hard bounce" basically means you sent your campaign to a bad, "undeliverable" email address. Maybe the person closed down their account, or got fired. Whatever the case, you shouldn't send anymore emails to that address, or the recipient's email server will start blocking you. Segnant Mailer instantly removes hard bounced emails from your mailing list for you. The other bounce type is a "soft" bounce. In general, a soft bounce just means the recipient's email account was "temporarily unavailable." Maybe their server was busy, or their account was too full. Currently Segnant Mailer does not track soft bounce emails. The future versions of Segnant Mailer will certainly have this feature too.