e-Blasts (Newsletter) Part IV: Review Sent e-Blast (including Metrics)
- After sending an e-Blast, you will find the e-Blast on the Main Menu: Communications: History index page.
- From the drop down to the right of the e-Blast, you can view the recipients by clicking the View Recipients options. This list is view only (you can't make any changes to it). Please Note: you will also be able to see that a contact received an e-Blast on their Engagement History as well. You can search for contacts who were sent a particular e-Blast using Advanced Search or can generate a list of recipients of a particular e-Blast through a custom report as well.
- You can review the content that was sent as well as the metrics (opens, clicks, bounces) for the e-Blast by choosing View Summary from the drop down on the right when on the Communications History Index page.
- On the View Summary page there are two tabs - Summary and Activity. The Activity tab has a number of a sub-tabs/screens. When you first land on this page, you will be on the Summary tab. Clicking on anything interactive in this screen will take you to one of the Activity sub-tabs. You can navigate back and forth between the various metric drill down screens and back to the summary/overview screen using the tabs in the upper left.
- On the View Summary page you will be able to see a summary of the number of recipients, the e-Blast's subject line, and the date & time it was sent in the upper left of the screen.
- Clicking the number of recipients (in green) will bring up the list of recipient names and email addresses (and will switch you to the Activity: Sent To tab). From here, you can see how many times (if any) each recipient opened the e-Blast and how many times (if any) they clicked any of the links in the e-Blast.
- This list of recipients IS interactive. From the drop down to the right of each recipient, you can Edit or Delete any contact's email address.
- If you select Edit, a pop up window will open that will allow you to edit the contact's email address. Any updates made here WILL update the contact record. This can be a fast/easy way to update any bad emails prior to using the "Resend" function to resend the e-Blast to the same recipients.
- If you select Delete, a pop up window will open asking you to confirm that you wish to delete the email address. Deleting the email address will remove it permanently from the contact record.
- Additionally, you can check the white box to the left of one or more recipient(s) and click the blue Delete Selected Contact Email(s) in the lower right to delete multiple email addresses at once. A pop up will open asking you to confirm that you want to delete the emails. The option to email addresses can be used to purge bad emails from your system in bulk. However, keep in mind that you will then have no record of these bad email addresses/that these contacts' email addresses are bad. There is no harm to leaving bad email addresses in your system as the system won't attempt to send to bad email addresses (thereby risking ruining your organization's/domain's internet reputation).
- On the Summary tab/screen, you can see the content/email that was sent to the recipients by clicking the Preview button.
- The Open Rate and Click Rate are auto-calculated. The Open Rate is the unique number of recipients who opened the e-Blast divided by the total number of recipients. The Click Rate is the unique number of recipients who clicked at least one link in the e-Blast divided by the total number of recipients.
- Clicking on any of the numbers in the lower half of the screen will take you to a drill down list of the recipients on that list (e.g. clicking on the number Clicked will show a list of the recipients who clicked at least one link in the email). You can also access the drill down list for each metric from the Activity tab at the top of the screen (and navigate between the various drill down lists via the Activity tab at the top of the screen rather than going back to the Summary tab each time).
- Following are the definitions of each of the provided metrics:
- Opened is the unique count of recipients who opened the email. Keep in mind that the # who read your email may actually be higher. Those who use the "preview" function in Gmail, Outlook, etc. can read the entire email without actually opening it. Those using the preview pane will not be counted in your opens. There is some danger in purging contacts who appear to have never opened your emails from your subscriber list in that they may actually be reading your emails via the preview pane (and, as such, you may actually purge active subscribers/readers if you rely just on the Open metric to determine who has read your email). All emails received by people using the Apple mail privacy feature will be opened at least once by a robot. The Open section can't differentiate if it was open by a robot or by a real user.
- Clicked is the unique count of recipients who have clicked any/at least one link in your email. We suggest referring on the Click rather than Open for reliable metrics as clicks always comes from real users, not robot.
- Bounced is the unique count of recipients who didn't receive your email due to a hard or a soft bounce. A hard bounce is an outright rejection, usually due to a bad email address or your domain/email being blacklisted. A soft bounce is a temporary inability to deliver the email, usually due to a service outage or the recipient's email box being full. The system will attempt to deliver a soft bounce email 3 times/for 3 days. After the third failed attempt due to a soft bounce, the bounce becomes a hard bounce/permanent failure. After a soft bounce converts to a hard bounce, there is no way to tell that it was initially a soft bounce. As such, recommended best practice is to monitor your soft bounce metrics for up to three days after you send an e-Blast to identify any email addresses that end up hard bounced due to soft bounce reasons (full mailbox, temporary outage on recipient's end, etc.) so that you can then reset the bad email flag on those contact records so they don't become permanently excluded from future communications.
- Unsubscribed is the unique count of recipients who clicked the "unsubscribe" link in your e-Blast and completed the request to be unsubscribed.
- Successful Deliveries is the unique number of recipients who received your e-Blast to their inbox. The number of Successful Deliveries + the number Bounced = total number of recipients.
- Total Opens is a non-unique count of the number of times your e-mail was opened by recipients. If Sally opened the email twice, she will be counted twice in the Total Opens (and once in the Opened count).
- Total Clicks is a non-unique count of the number of times links in your e-Blast were clicked. If Sally clicks five links in the email, she is counted five times in the Total Clicks. If she clicks five different links one time each, she is counted five times in the Total Clicks. In both examples, she is counted only once in the Clicked metric.
- Spam Complaints is the unique count of recipients who reported your email as spam to their email provider.
- In addition, the Activity tab has one additional metric that doesn't show on the Summary screen for "Didn't Open" - which is the list of all contact's who did not open your e-Blast. However, as with the number of opens, contacts who read the email using the preview pane in their email program will show as not having opened the email even though they did read it, so take this list with a grain of salt.
- You can search for or filter contacts using any/all of these metrics using the e-Blast category in the Advanced Search interface (which is used in Advanced Search, e-Blasts, Smart Tags, Letters, and e-Appeals). Please Note: not all of the metrics have been brought into the Advanced Search interface by default. If you need a metric that is not showing by default, email us at support@fundly.com to ask us to add it.
- You can report on (or filter a report) using any/all of these metrics in the reports module using the fields on the Communications: Newsletter Statistics table.
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