Manage Email Campaigns

In this article, you'll learn how to use the Reports and Performance section of the Admin Console to manage and track your email campaigns. Once you've sent out your email campaign (in HTML format), your business can track what happens to each of the emails that has been sent. You can find out how many email addresses it reached, how many it bounced from, how many people have opened the email and so forth.

Note: Email campaigns sent in plain text are not tracked in the system.

To learn how to send an email campaign, see Sending your first email campaign.

You can only view the Reports and Performance for email campaigns that have already been delivered for one-off email campaigns. For on-going anniversary or loyalty campaigns, you will be able to view the results after the first email has been delivered with the report results changing for each subsequent email that is sent. To review the statistics, follow these steps:

Campaign summary and actions taken

The campaign summary gives you an executive overview of your email campaign. Please keep in mind that this level of reporting is only available for emails sent in HTML format. You will see:

• Total Recipients: This was the number of email addresses that the system attempted to send the email to (from the mailing list)
• Customer Opens: This is the number unique customers who have clicked on your email within their email client
• Customer Actions: Number of actions that were a direct result of receiving this email and clicking on a link within the email. Actions include making an online purchase, filling out a webform, making a booking etc a customer can make more than 1 action
• Bounces: This is the number of email addresses that rejected your email
• Unsubscribes: In accordance with CAN-SPAM, your email you continue an 'Unsubscribe' link and your Online Business measures how many people unsubcribe from receiving further email communications from you as a result of this email.

You can click the links to the reports associated with each email. These reports open in a new window. These contain detailed listings for  the statistics described above.

Beneath the campaign summary you'll see graphical representations of your statistics for your email campaign rates and customer actions.

Open Rates, Bounce Rates, Top 10 Links, Top 10 Actions

At the bottom of the page you'll see some more statistics. Click on any of the 4 graph types beneath the graph to see the data:

• Opened Rate - shows how many people open your email on different days. This is particularly useful for on-going loyalty and anniversary email campaigns. For one-off emails, most recipients will open within the first 3 days.
• Bounced Rate - shows when emails are being rejected. Again this is only useful for on-going loyalty and anniversary email campaigns.
• Top 10 Links - if you put hyperlinks within the content of your email campaign this shows which ones are generating the most clicks.
• Top 10 Actions - the system is also able to tell you what users are doing on your site when they are referred there by links within your email (hint: always make sure you have a link to your site from your email campaign)

Cleaning up bounced email addresses

After every email campaign, you should clean up your bounced email addresses from your mailing list. It's important to do this on a regular basis as bounced emails arise from:

• misspelled or bad domains
• 'spam' email addresses being used to sign up for your email campaigns
• incorrectly entered email addresses and
• inactive email addresses

ISPs are looking for emails being sent to these addresses and could block your emails (blacklist your domain) if you have too many bounced email addresses. To unsubscribe the bounced email addresses, click the Email addresses that bounced link.

Select the checkbox for the email address you want to unsubscribe or choose select all, then use the Actions menu to choose unsubscribe.

For more information about unsubscribing bounced email messages, read Unsubscribing email addresses that have bounced.

Detailed listing of customer actions

Another report to review is the Actions Customers Took report. It is the most direct measure of the ROI your email campaigns are producing. You can see who's purchased products online so that you can follow up with people who've submitted a form to send an inquiry, knowing they've read the content in your email.

Unsubscribing email addresses that have bounced

Understanding bounced email messages 

When you send email campaigns, the message content is sent to the email addresses in the recipient list you selected for the campaign. Usually, the messages are sent successfully, but there may be cases where the subscriber has cancelled their email account and the message cannot be delivered. Other issues, such as the recipient's inbox exceeding its limit, can also cause messages not to be delivered. When an email campaign message cannot be delivered, the error message is returned to the system. These are called bounce email messages.

When the system receives the message that a message bounced due to the following errors, the email addresses are added to the Global Black List for the site:

mail box unavailable 

user does not exist 

Future correspondence sent to this address is automatically blocked for 45 days unless the user verifies their address in the system before the 45 days elapses by performing a double-opt in.

A double opt-in describes the process when a visitor subscribes to a newsletter or other email marketing messages by explicitly requesting it, and then confirming the email address to be their own. In most cases, the confirmation is performed when the subscriber clicks a link in a subscription confirmation message sent to their email address, which confirms that they can access the email account and they intended to subscribe to receive the messages.

Double opt-in confirmation is always recommended, because it eliminates the chance of spam or abuse where a third-party subscribes using somebody else's email address without their knowledge and against their will. 

Using the Campaign Report to unsubscribe email addresses that bounced

You can use the email campaign report to see the list of email addresses that bounced. These addresses are currently listed on the Global Black List. Using the interface, you can unsubscribe bounced email addresses, to remove them from the recipient list. Follow these steps:

Note: If you do not unsubscribe the bounced (invalid) email addresses, the system will automatically block them for 45 days and will not attempt to deliver messages unless the subscriber visits the site, resubscribes to the newsletter and then confirms their email address by clicking the link in the confirmation message they receive. This process is called a double opt-in.