02. Understanding Email and Dashboard Metrics

Analyzing campaign performance is based on measuring contact behavior.  We track the activity of each contact.  There are a few ways we do this.  The first way is by tracking what each contact does when an email is sent to them.  

Understanding the email tracking measurements. Depending on the dashboard you are using you will see measurements labeled as:

Targeted People,

The total number of deliverable emails in your selected list of contacts. 

Delivered, or Emails Sent, or Active People.

This is the total number of unique contacts that received your email message/messages.  Messages that were not delivered will be tracked as either Soft Bounce, or Hard Bounce.  

    Soft Bounces: This is a list of people whose email addresses we temporarily unavailable to receive emails. The system will attempt to deliver emails to them in the future again. However, you are able to download this list now and reach out to these people using other means of communication.

Hard Bounces: This is a list of people whose email addresses are invalid. Once again, you cannot email them, but you can download this list and send them Direct Mail. assuming you have their mailing address.

Opens, or Emails Opened

“Opens” measure how many people opened up your email and looked at it. Hopefully, they read it, yet there’s no guarantee they did any more than glance at it, and there is no way to track how long they looked at the email.

While that may seem really straightforward, there is a hitch. The number of “opens” you see may not represent everyone who viewed your email.

To collect data on the “open,” the recipient must allow HTML and images in their emails. Some people do not, especially on mobile, so you have no way to know if those recipients opened the email you sent. Comparing the opens data with those emails were “delivered” is something to keep in mind as you review an email campaign’s performance, especially if it was targeted for mobile-heavy audiences.

It also worth noting that, since “opens” happen before the recipient has read the content of the email, open rates often have more to do with how compelling your subject line is and the relationship with the company or product.

Clicks, or Email Link Clicked.

“Clicks” measure how many people clicked on a link within your email.

While “Opens” only measure how many people look at your email, your “clicks” represent how many people read the content of your email and were compelled to click through to your target page. For example, the “clicks” for an email highlighting your product or service represent how many people clicked on the link to the offer page from the email you sent.

This is an important number because it helps you measure how effective your emails are at driving traffic to your landing page or website and convincing readers to take action.

If you’re getting lots of “opens,” but your “clicks” are suffering, you need to look at the strength of your offer or call to action. Is it compelling and relevant to your audience? 

Visited Page.

This tracks the total number of people who visited your landing page.  This varies slightly from Clicks as the visitor may have come from a source other than your email, such as by clicking on a link in a social media post for example. 

Leads.

Leads are visitors that submitted a form for example but did not complete all of the steps in the campaign.  Depending on how you have conversion configured, Leads and Conversion can be the same thing. 

Conversions.

“Conversions” indicate the number of people who took all of the steps the campaign asked them to, whether this is visiting your landing page and completing a contact form and submitting a request to get more information or download the article you posted, etc.  This is a measurement of complete success from the campaign.  When setting up your campaigns you have the ability to define what constitutes a conversion. 

Unsubscribes, Opt-out.

Unsubscribes shows the contacts that clicked on the unsubscribe link (MindFire provides this automatically, and it can be customized by setting up a custom unsubscribe flow in the email settings tab of the settings menu).  Any contact who unsubscribes will no longer receive emails from any of your campaigns.  To add an unsubscribed contact back to your contact list requires the contact to submit a new contact form as they are permanently quarantined in the system until they authorize resubscription.