Reading Your Newsletter Reports

What the numbers on your newsletter overview and campaign reports mean, and why clicks are the number to watch.

Every email you send gets its own report: how many arrived, who clicked what, and who left the list. Your Newsletter overview pulls the most useful numbers together so you can see how things are going at a glance.

Your Newsletter overview

Go to Newsletter → Overview. Once you have subscribers, the top of the page shows three numbers:

Subscribers: the people you can email right now.
Joined this month: new people who signed up this month.
Click rate: the share of people who clicked a link, averaged over your last five sends.

Needs attention

If anything is standing between you and a send that works, it is listed under Needs attention, each with a link to the page that fixes it. For example:

A list that still needs a postal address or a sending address.
A campaign that did not go out, or blog emails that could not reach your blog.
Nobody on your list yet.
Your list growing past the size your plan covers, so you know before the bill rather than after it.

When everything is in order, this section does not appear.

Up next and Recent sends

Up next shows your next scheduled campaign and any automatic blog emails, with when each one is due. Recent sends lists your latest emails with how many were Delivered, how many people Clicked and how many Unsubscribed. Click any row to open its full report.

The spam line

Open Audience and delivery details at the bottom of the overview. It shows what share of people marked your recent emails as spam, next to the line to stay under: 0.3%. If yours gets close and you are not sure why, get in touch and we will look at it with you.

A campaign's report

Go to Newsletter → Campaigns, open the Sent tab, and click Report next to an email. You will see every time that campaign has gone out (for blog emails, that is each edition). The columns are Sent, Arrived, Clicked and Left (people who unsubscribed). Click the date to open the full report for that send.

The full report for one send

At the top are four numbers:

clicked a link, with the click rate underneath.
arrived: delivered to the person's inbox provider.
came back: the address could not take the email, often because it no longer exists.
marked it as spam, shown against the 0.3% line.

About opens

You will also see Opened, marked as "roughly". Please treat it as a rough signal only. Apple Mail, which a lot of people use, loads every email's pictures automatically in the background, and that looks exactly like an open whether or not the person ever read anything. So the open count is always higher than the number of people who really read your email, and it can go up without anyone looking.

A click is different: a real person chose to tap a link. That is why clicks are the number we put first, and the one worth judging an email on.

What people clicked

Under What people clicked you can see each link in the email, how many different people clicked it, and how many clicks it got in total. This is the best way to learn what your readers care about.

Recipients

The Recipients list shows every person the email went to and what happened. Search for an address, or use the menu to show only people who Clicked, Opened, Came back, Unsubscribed, or Did not send. Each person shows one of:

Arrived
Sent (on its way, not yet confirmed as arrived)
Came back undelivered
Marked as spam
Waiting to go
A short reason, if it could not be sent to them

You can also click View in browser to see the email exactly as it went out.

Send it again to people who did not click

Two days after an email finishes sending, a Send again to those who have not clicked button appears on its report. It sends the same email to everyone who received it and has not clicked anything, with a new subject line (we suggest one starting "Another look:", and you can change it). You can do this once per email.

This works well for an event or an offer that people may simply have missed. Use it sparingly: sending the same thing twice to people who were not interested is the quickest way to get unsubscribes.

A few things worth knowing

Numbers keep updating for a while after a send as results come in.
A send from a brand new newsletter address can go out over a few days, while the address builds a good name with inbox providers. Until everyone has it, the report says how many people it has gone to so far, and Campaigns shows Going out over the next few days. Anyone who unsubscribes in the meantime is not sent it.
People who leave, turn off a topic or are blocked are counted at the moment the email goes out, not when you wrote it.
If a send did not go out, the reason is shown on its report. If it does not make sense, open a ticket and a real person will explain what happened.