HubSpot Email Guide: How to measure your email campaigns' performance
There are several reporting features in HubSpot's email application that will let you optimize your email campaigns over time. You'll be able to see who opened and clicked on what emails, which emails had higher click-through rates, and which links were clicked the most in each email.
1. See high-level data on the Email Dashboard
Find your Email dashboard.
On the email dashboard, you'll see the top-level data for all of your emails. The dropdown menus at the top of the page will let you filter by status (Sent, Scheduled, Draft, Automated, Archived) and/or by campaign.
You can select the high-level data you want shown on the dashboard. There are a lot of options, but some of the most common ones are:
- Delivery - how many emails accepted by a recipient's server
- Opens - the number of emails opened by a recipient
- Open rate - the percentage of delivered emails that were opened
- Clicks - the number of emails in which a recipient clicked a link
- Click rate - the percentage of delivered emails in which a recipient clicked a link
To select which data is displayed on the dashboard, choose from the three dropdowns in the Showing section. If you are unsure of what some of the options mean, just hover over them for an explanation.
2. See detailed email stats
Click on the name of the email you want to see detailed stats for.
3. See how your recipients interacted with your email
On the Contacts page, you'll be able to see how your contacts interacted with your email.
Delivered - your email was successfully delivered.
Deferred - the email has not yet been successfully delivered. This could be due to several factors, including having the wrong email address, the email address may have been deleted, or a spam filter might have blocked your email from going through.
Opened - the recipient opened your email.
Clicked - the recipient clicked on a link in your email.
Unsubscribed - the recipient clicked either the unsubscribe or email preferences link in the footer of your email.
Marked Spam - the recipient reported the email as spam. This is worse than simply unsubscribing because it may affect the deliverability of future emails you try to send. To read tactics on how to avoid spam filters, click here.
Ineligible - the email was removed prior to sending by HubSpot as a result of prior failures, bad email addresses, unsubscribes or spam reports
Soft Bounce (Pending) - the email was deferred by the receiving ISP and will be retried. Soft bounce is a transient state that will become delivered or hard bounce eventually.
Hard Bounce - the email was reported by the receiving ISP as a permanent failure. These email addresses will be ineligible in subsequent HubSpot sends.
4. Send an email to contacts who opened or clicked
If you'd like to send an email specifically to recipients of this email who opened or clicked on a link in your email, click on the filter drop-down menu and select Opened or Clicked.
Under the list dropdown on the right, select Create new list. This will allow you to create a list just of the recipients who opened or clicked an email, and you can then create an email to send to this list.
5. Get performance stats
On the Performance tab, we've generated graphs for you for each aspect of your email's performance.
Engagement
The first engagement graph displays the raw data of how many emails were delivered vs. opened vs. clicked.
The second engagement graph shows:
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Delivery rate = delivered emails / sent emails
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Open rate = opened emails / delivered emails
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Click-through rate = clicked emails / delivered emails
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Click-through rate = clicked emails / opened emails
Contact Churn
The Contact Churn graph reveals how many email subscribers you've lost due to this email.
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Total lost contacts = people who clicked the unsubscribe link + people who reported your email as spam
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Unsubscribed = people who clicked the unsubscribe link
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Spam report = people who reported your email as spam
Delivery Failure
The Delivery Failure graph shows how many emails were not successfully delivered to your contacts.
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Hard bounce = HubSpot sent your email, and the recipient's server rejected it. Common reasons are that the account no longer exist or that the domain does not exist.
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Soft bounce = HubSpot sent the email to the server and it was processed, but for some reason it was returned to HubSpot. Common reasons are that the recipient is over quota for how many emails he/she can receive or the server is temporarily unavailable.
6. See which links were clicked the most
On the Clicks page, you can see which URLs received the most clicks in your email. This will allow you to see which Calls to Action are more enticing to your recipients.
HubSpot's insights to how your emails are performing can help you when choosing aspects of your future emails. Use the insights on the Email Dashboard for future planning.
