Welcome back to the Smart Send Authority series.
Today we're taking a break from creating campaigns to examine your reports. Specifically, what metrics you need for proper analysis and tracking in 2025 and 26.
Your reporting statistics fall into three distinct clusters. The ones you pick depend on where you are in your journey and what's happening with your audience.
Beyond the open rate
Your email program lives or dies by the numbers you track. But most people are tracking the wrong things. Your aim should be on your list health, your engagement and your sales. Let’s dive into each section.
Cluster 1: Audience Health (Are People Actually Getting Your Emails?)
This is the foundation of your marketing.
If you don't have people opening and reading, you don't have an email program.
For this cluster, you're looking at:
- List growth and churn rates (including unsubscribe rate)
- List degrading trends (bounces, spam complaints, unsubscribes)
- People who grow dormant (you can address these differently)
Your List Should Be Growing
There's no other way to describe it.
If it's not growing, it's actually decreasing. People will leave your list every year. It doesn't matter what you sell or how good you are. Life circumstances dictate your list will shrink.
So you've got to go out and get new subscribers.
Where can I find these metrics?
I'm going to focus on MailChimp for this series. But you can find these in Klaviyo, HubSpot, Constant Contact, and Salesforce too.
They all have these statistics in their reports.
You can usually find them on the dashboard or in a custom report. If you're a MailChimp user, you'll find most of these key statistics on your home page.
I recommend tracking:
- Email performance
- Revenue (if you've got your shop linked up)
- List health
For audience health, check:
- Total email subscribers
- Net growth (you'll find this beneath your audience tab)
- The percentage going up or down
That's really important.
Don't Fear Unsubscribes (They're Doing You a Favor)
Unsubscribes aren't necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, when you start taking a new direction and re-narrowing in on your customer persona or offer, people will unsubscribe. They literally exclude themselves from your world.
That means you're getting closer to what you want, not walking away from it.
You can always get more subscribers.
The Key: Watch Your Deliverability Like a Hawk
If you're seeing a lot of bounce backs or spam complaints, one of two things is happening:
- Your traffic source is bad (spam bots entering fake emails, or you just ran a competition)
- You've had a deliverability complaint against your brand to one of the top email platforms (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Apple)
You need to watch this every month to see if your deliverability is going down or up. And if your sender reputation is good.
How to Fix Deliverability Problems
Use these tools:
- Inboxer for deliverability checks
- Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS for direct provider data
- Mail Tester to check your spam placement
- Inbox Radar to see where you're getting placed
Don't hesitate to use these tools. They can save you from a very expensive mistake further down the line.
Cluster 2: Email Interaction (Are People Actually Engaging?)
Let's assume everything is rosy.
Your audience is growing. You're getting great deliverability stats every time you send campaigns (like 99%). You've got very low unsubscribe and bounce rates.
Fantastic!
So, what about people interacting with your email? What are your campaign reports telling you?
You need to look at:
- Open rate (but adjust this for Apple's privacy policy, the MPP, as it gets called)
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rates (people who go from your email to your offer and actually take action)
If you have an e-shop where you physically track the money you make per sale, you can also see the revenue. Both per campaign and the total for the entire year.
You'll find all these in the individual reports on your email campaigns and on your dashboard.
Keep an Eye on Order Rate and Revenue
You'll have an average order value and an average per email order value.
What you want to do ideally is get those up. That's usually not just the emails. It's also a blend of your offers, your appeal, your messaging, and your timing.
There will be dips and troughs throughout the year.
So it's worth mapping what your order revenue rate looks like across the year as you do it. You'll literally see it go up and down.
Q4 tends to be the strongest for ecommerce shops (obvious reasons). Q2 tends to be strongest for B2B (again, obvious reasons, because it's connected to year-end and people like to spend money or place orders).
Engagement Segmentation: Your Secret Weapon
This is what kind of activity you get from specific groups of subscribers in your list.
It's behavior-based and activity-based.
Let me explain the difference.
Behavior-Based Tracking
Look at everyone within a specific tag or segment. What’s their click-to-open rate?
That's a useful metric to track because you know it's very true to the inbox. You know they've actually seen it.
Then; you want people who clicked and where they clicked.
Go Into Your Heat Maps
This is where going into individual campaigns and scrolling down the heat maps is really useful.
People are driven by behavior in different ways:
- The Essay Readers: They read through your entire email and click at the bottom
- The Impatient Ones: They see your name and brand, go "I'm interested," and click through at the top just to see the offer (they don't care about the message, they like and trust you)
- The Delayed Responders: They might not do anything at all but come back in two weeks
I call them my "pingbacks" and I find them intensely annoying but also enriching. These guys tend to be the ones that keep your emails for long periods and often become your best customers.
They're very much the long tail side of the email marketing world.
Run A/B Tests to Confirm Your Hunches
Go into your individual campaigns and look at the click maps. See where people are clicking so you can make accurate hypotheses and guesses.
From there, you can run A/B tests to see whether you're right.
You can do this scientifically if you have over 5,000 people on your list. If you don't, don't despair. You can still do A/B tests and just split it.
But you've got to do it for at least 1,000 to get decent data.
Cluster 3: Long-Term Customer Value (The Big Numbers)
These are more advanced.
This is what happens to your customers over the long run:
- Subscriber lifetime value
- Inbox placement
- Dormant ratio
These are the big numbers.
Whereas the other metrics you check on a daily or weekly basis (if you're sending a lot of email), these you track over the longer term. Get some custom reports up and really do the work.
Sit down and do the deep dive into:
- Your subscriber lifetime value
- Your retention rate
- Upsells and cross-sells from campaigns and automations
- % of people going dormant after 3 months
You'll Need Data from Multiple Sources
Yes, it's a pain in the ass. But it's well worth it.
Collect what you've got from email. Remember, you can use tracking in MailChimp with UTM strings. That's a little string of code appended to the end of each URL you use.
If someone clicks through to your campaign, you can track them. That's how you create long-term engagement and customer tracking.
Go check your accounts if you don't do ecommerce. Look up customers by their email address in their profile. See what they're spending.
Dig in and say: "This customer bought this, this, and this. They clicked on these campaigns. There's a strong correlation between this and that. We know these work."
You Don't Need to Do This for Everyone
If you feel you don't have time (although you can literally sit down on a quiet day when everyone else has shut down with a cup of coffee and just go through this), just do this for your top 20 customers or your top 30% of spend.
They correlate to the most active people on your list.
Go in, have a look, have a bet with yourself.
The Long-Term View Wins the Marathon
It's very easy in email marketing to react short-term, month by month, quarter by quarter.
But you want to know what's happening across the entire sales cycle. Then you can put plans in place to improve it.
You'll learn:
- How to get more revenue per customer
- When to expect a trough or dip (so you don't panic)
- How to manage your energy
This is a long-term thing. You're in it for the marathon.
Finally, go back to your engagement segmentation. Look at who engages and when, both in your campaigns and automations. Map it out next to each other.
When you've got that, you're in a very powerful position.
Because you know how your audience works, why they react, and what you can predict next.
AI Analytics: The One Area Where AI Lives Up to the Hype
This is one of the areas where AI fulfills the tech boys promises. It’s a predictive copying machine, so unsurprisingly, it does predictive analytics really well.
You can now do this through automation. AI will predict: "Looking at the past buying behaviour from similar profiles, we think Mrs X will do this in X days. Let’s send her a re-engagement email then."
AI also does predictive analytics over a wide range of data points, so you can create much smaller, more refined audience segments. Most humans just don't have the brain space for this.
But AI eats this stuff up because it's all pattern recognition.
So by all means, play with AI and use it for mapping and reports.
Honorable Mention: Conversion Rates (Coming In and Going Out)
If you're looking at conversion rates, make sure you include:
- People who convert on your sales page
- People who convert on your pop-ups and landing pages
Look at people coming into your email world and people going out.
For me, that's a key statistic.
I do omnichannel marketing, so each and every one of your efforts stack upon each other. You want to be looking at a 6% conversion rate or more coming in.
And you want the maximum you can get going out again.
Stack Your Marketing Efforts
Send an email with an offer to someone in a campaign. Then stack on top of that a retargeting ad and a banner on your website.
The three work really well together to drive up that conversion rate.
So don't be afraid to extend and expand out. A lot of these tools are really cheap. See what you can get.
Squeeze the maximum out of each campaign.
Give people the service and the responsibility of seeing your offer everywhere. Let them know.
It's a busy, busy world out there.
And you will reap the rewards.
Until next time, take care.
