It’s important to measure everything you do in your marketing…and that includes your email marketing.
Email marketing tends to be one of those things where we put together our email or newsletter, then never check the stats to see how it performed. It’s like hiring someone to work in your business and never checking up on them.
But if you don’t know your numbers, you can’t make the proper adjustments to optimize your email marketing campaigns.
Constant Contact is a professional email service provider used by more than 600,000 people. Of those, I would bet most do not check their reporting. Either they don’t know it exists or they are not sure what they should be paying attention to in their email reporting.
So let’s dive into Constant Contact’s reporting feature.
The first thing you will need to do after you login to your Constant Contact account is to click on the Reporting tab at the top of the page. This will bring up your reporting page.
If you click on the down arrow next to Past 12 Months, you can select a date range to view your email stats for that particular time period.
In the Overview section, you will see Sends, Opens, and Clicks.
In the Sends section, you will see the total number of contacts you’ve sent emails to along with the average open rate, unopened rate, click rate, and bounce rate.
In the Opens section, you will discover the total number of emails opened and device they were on when they opened your email – desktop, tablet, or mobile.
In the Clicks section, you will find the total number of clicks for the specified period and a breakdown of clicks by device.
On the right side of the page, click the down arrow next to Download As and you can download the report in several different formats.
Scroll down the page and you will see the Trends section where you can view your average open and click through rates compared to the industry average. This will give you a good kdea of how your numbers compare to others in your industry.
In the Trends section, you will also find tips for improving your open and click rates.
When you scroll down further, you will see your individual emails. Here is where you can see the individual performance of all your emails. You have a couple of options – Export and Compare All.
You can either click Export and download a spreadsheet of all your emails during your specified time period or you can select a specific email and Export the stats for that specific email.
There is the option to Compare All where you can select up to 5 emails and compare the results for the selected emails in a graphical report.
And here is something really powerful. You can click on the number in the associated column beside the individual email – Opens, Clicks, Bounces, Unsubscribes – and see the email addresses of the people who opened your email, what they clicked on (and who clicked on it), email addresses of Bounces, and email addresses of Unsubscribes.
You can also accomplish basically the same thing by clicking on the individual email in the Campaign Name column where you will see more detailed stats. When you display the more detailed stats, you can click on the individual numbers to get more information. For example, if you click on the number net to Opens, you will be able to see the email address of the person who opened your email. You can do the same thing with Sent, Bounces, and Did Not Opens.
You will want to make sure you maintain your Bounces. If you click on the number under the Bounces column, you will see the following with a list of bounced email address, first name, last name, and bounce type:
On the Bounces report page, click on the down arrow next to All Types and select Recommended for removal. This will show you all the emails Constant Contact is recommending for removal. Go ahead and delete these.
The other types are Non-existent, Suspended, Undeliverable, Blocked, Mailbox Full, and Vacation/Auto-reply.
Non-existent, as the name implies, means the email does not exist. It’s like you sent a letter to the wrong street address. There are two options for handling these type bounces. Check the email address for obvious typos. If you know the person, contact them to see if their email address has changed.
Suspended is when an email address consistently bounces as Non-existent. This is one to really watch because it can impact deliverability rates. Generally, Constant Contact recommends you remove these from your list.
Undeliverable emails are like getting a busy signal on the phone. When the email was sent the ISP (Internet Service Provider) did not respond. Constant Contact will keep trying to send the email for up to 3 days. If there is no response after that, it is classified as Undeliverable. If it is still classified as undeliverable after 3 day, your other option is to contact the person to see if their email address has changed.
Blocked means the ISP has decided not to deliver the email due to a policy/filter on the recipient’s end. This could be due to any number of reasons specific to the ISP and the recipient.
Mailbox full is self-explanatory. They may no longer work for the company or organization, be on extended leave, or any number of other reasons. Get in touch with them to see if their email address has changed and to let them know their mailbox is full.
Vacation/Auto-reply let’s you know the email is in your contact’s inbox, but they may not see it for a while. You can ignore these type bounces.
Click Here to learn more about handling Bounced emails.
