Email summary report

In this article, we’ll walk through the main email metrics you’ll find in summary reports and bounce reports and show you how to understand them to properly evaluate your campaigns.

Revenue

Revenue is simply the money generated by emails you send from the ExpertSender platform. We show your revenue in the currency you picked when setting up your business unit.

Using the filters in your reports, you can track revenue and see how it changes over time. This helps you fine-tune your email campaigns and make them more effective.

Email sending and deliverability

Sent messages

This tells you how many emails went out in a specific campaign or timeframe. It includes both messages that made it to inboxes and those that bounced back for various reasons. This basic metric helps you see your campaign’s reach.

Delivery rate

The delivery rate shows what percentage of sent emails reached your recipients’ inboxes.

It gives you a good indication of your recipient database health. When you see your delivery rate drop below 95%, it likely means you have some incorrect email addresses in your database.

Try looking at this metric alongside your open rate. If you notice a high delivery rate but few opens, your message probably landed in the spam folder and won’t be read on time.

Bounce rate#

The bounce rate tells you what percentage of your sent emails didn’t reach recipients and came back to you.

A low bounce rate means your email list is healthy and you have a good sender reputation. If this rate starts climbing, it’s time to clean up your email list.

Bounce rate is one of the more important yet complex deliverability metrics. That’s why it helps to look deeper into the types of bounces you’re getting and which domains they’re happening on.

This way, you’ll discover why messages are being rejected and where problems happen most often.

Bounce types

We group bounces into these categories:

1. Hard bounces – these happen when:
   • The recipient’s address isn’t valid or doesn’t exist.
   • The recipient’s domain name or domain doesn’t exist.
2. Blocked messages – these occur when:
   • The receiving mail server blocks your sending server.
   • The recipient’s server rejects your email because of poor reputation or blacklisting.
   • Your message content looks like spam.
3. Soft bounces – these are temporary problems:
   • The recipient’s mailbox is full.
   • The recipient’s email server is temporarily down or having technical issues.
   • Your message is too large for the recipient’s server limits.
4. Other – any bounces that don’t fit the categories above, showing unique rejection reasons

What do these bounce types mean for your deliverability?

Hard bounces point to quality issues with your recipient list. This is why regular list cleaning is so important – you need to remove inactive email addresses regularly. You’ll keep your list quality high by using double opt-in newsletter signup.

Messages get blocked when your email content looks spammy or low-quality. Recipients don’t engage with these types of messages. They often mark them as spam too, which hurts your sender reputation.

Blocks can also happen when you send too many emails too quickly. Throttling helps prevent this. In ExpertSender CDP, you can set up throttling when sending your emails.

Soft bounces are temporary delivery problems. These usually happen on the recipient’s end or with their email server – things we can’t control. When this happens, we try delivering the message again before marking it as a hard bounce.

Bounces in domain families

Bounces in domain families show how many bounced emails you’re getting for each domain family.

It helps to check which domain families are causing bounces. This way, you can spot delivery issues specific to certain domains.

When you notice repeated bounces with one domain family, first check for obvious issues like outdated addresses or poor content quality. If bounces keep happening, try reaching out to the domain’s administrator to ask what’s going on.

Unsubscribe rate

The unsubscribe rate shows what percentage of people opted out after receiving your email. It’s one of the most watched marketing KPIs.

Your unsubscribe rate shouldn’t go above 1% of delivered emails. If you’re keeping it around 0.5% – you’re doing great!

A high unsubscribe rate often means recipients are losing interest in what you’re offering. It could be that your content or sending frequency isn’t matching what your audience wants.

It’s much harder to win back someone who’s unsubscribed than to keep current subscribers engaged, so keep a close eye on your open and click stats and be ready to adjust your strategy quickly.

Email opens

By tracking opens and unique opens, you learn whether and how people are responding to your offers and brand.

Open rate

The open rate simply means what percentage of your delivered emails were opened.

This matters for deliverability because it confirms your email made it to the inbox successfully. When viewed as a heatmap, the open rate shows you how interest in your message spreads over time.

This rate counts all opens, so you can see how many people come back to read your message again. Higher open rates for sales announcements or new collection emails suggest this content appeals to your audience. If your open rate drops, try changing your content first, then look at your sending schedule.

Unique open rate

The unique open rate counts only the first time each recipient opens your email. Repeat opens from the same person don’t count.

A high unique open rate is a good sign – it means people respond positively to your brand and your subject lines stand out in crowded inboxes.

It shows your communication works and grabs attention.

For tracking purposes, we place a tiny 1×1 pixel invisible image in your email. We count an open when this image loads.

Email clicks

Tracking link clicks tells you how engaging your content really is.

Click rate

The click rate shows what percentage of recipients clicked any link in your email. The link format doesn’t matter – it could be an image, button, or standard blue hyperlink.

Watching your click rate helps you see how engagement with your message changes over time, which content gets the most clicks, and when people are most active.

Unique click rate

The unique click rate counts only the first click on each link. Later clicks on the same link don’t count.

Unique clicks reveal what actually interests your audience and what you need to focus on to get conversions.

If some links aren’t getting clicks, consider changing their format, position in the email, or adding more engaging content like a strong call-to-action on your button. Personalization with dynamic content can help too.

CTOR or click-to-open rate

CTOR (click-to-open rate) shows you what percentage of opened emails had clicks on any link. This metric really shows how effective your content is. But it works best when you look at it alongside other metrics.

A high CTOR with few opens suggests your subject line wasn’t compelling enough to get opens, but your content was good enough that those who did open clicked your links. To fix this, create more engaging subject lines to boost opens so more people can interact with your valuable content.

When you see the opposite – lots of opens but a low CTOR – your subject line was probably catchy, but the content didn’t deliver what recipients expected or didn’t match their interests and needs.