Email reporting provides you with the insights you need to evaluate campaign performance, optimize future sends, and ensure that your messages not only reach your audience, but also make a meaningful impact.

In this article, we explore the most important email metrics, why they matter, and how you can interpret them correctly across different use cases and scenarios.

Why Email Reporting Matters

Email reporting offers far more than a simple dashboard of statistics you check occasionally. When used effectively, it becomes a continuous feedback loop that allows you to make real-time adjustments and improvements, significantly enhancing deliverability and overall campaign performance.

From monitoring email sends as they go out, to leveraging A/B testing to identify the most effective combination of subject line, creative, and call-to-action, email reporting empowers businesses to proactively improve communication and customer engagement.

Key Email Reporting Metrics

These are the six most important metrics you should be tracking.

1. Delivery rate

Definition:
The delivery rate represents the percentage of emails in a campaign that are successfully delivered to recipients’ inboxes.

What is considered a “good” delivery rate?
With high-quality list data, validated email addresses, and adherence to email deliverability and sender reputation best practices, you should aim for delivery rates as close to 100% as possible. That said, anything above96% is considered excellent.

2. Open rate

Definition:
Open rate is the percentage of delivered emails that are actually opened by recipients.
It is a key indicator of subject line effectiveness and, for marketers, reflects how well audience segmentation and targeting are aligned with subscriber interests.
For operational or transactional emails, open rate indicates whether recipients are actually seeing important communications.

What is considered a “good” open rate?
Sending high-quality content to your most engaged subscribers results in the highest open rates. As a general benchmark, anything above 20% for marketing emails and above 50% for transactional emails is considered good.

3. Bounce rate

Definition:
Bounce rate is the percentage of sent emails that could not be delivered for any reason. Bounces are categorized as either hard or soft.
Hard bouncesare permanent, unrecoverable delivery failures. Examples include invalid email addresses due to typos or messages blocked by the recipient’s mail server because of spam complaints or blacklisting. In these cases, the specific message will never be delivered, although future emails may be accepted if your domain reputation is restored.
Soft bounces are temporary delivery issues. These may occur when a recipient’s inbox is full, the mail server is overloaded or under maintenance, or the message exceeds the maximum size allowed by the receiving server.
A high bounce rate should be investigated immediately, as it negatively impacts your sender reputation and increases the likelihood that email service providers will block future messages.

What is an acceptable bounce rate?
With proper list hygiene and the use of email validation services, hard bounces should be kept close to zero. While soft bounces are less controllable, an overall bounce rate below 3% is considered desirable.

4. Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Click-To-Open Rate (CTOR)

Definition:
Most email marketers differentiate between CTR and CTOR, as they measure different aspects of email performance.

• CTR (Click-through rate) measures the percentage of clicks relative to emails delivered.
• CTOR (Click-to-open rate) measures the percentage of clicks relative to emails opened.

In simple terms, CTR shows how many recipients clicked your email out of everyone who received it, while CTOR shows how many clicked after actually opening it.
CTR reflects overall interest, whereas CTOR reveals how engaging your content was for readers who viewed it.
It is also important to ensure your email software does not overcount clicks, as a single user may click the same link multiple times. When comparing campaign performance, always distinguish between total clicks and unique clicks.

What CTR and CTOR should you aim for?
Benchmarks vary widely depending on industry, audience, and campaign type, but CTOR is typically higher than CTR.

• ACTR above 5% is considered excellent.
• ACTOR above 20% is considered particularly strong.

5. Unsubscribe rate

Definition:
Unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of recipients who opt out of future emails from a specific campaign by clicking the “Unsubscribe” link within the message.
Unsubscribes are inevitable as customer needs evolve or interest in your products and services declines over time. However, you can minimize unsubscribes by delivering relevant, useful, and targeted communications to engaged recipients.

What should your unsubscribe rate be?
For a stable, long-term subscriber list, an unsubscribe rate above 0.5% is a cause for concern and may indicate that your content or targeting strategy needs improvement.
For lists consisting of newer subscribers, such as those acquired through a promotional campaign, a higher unsubscribe rate is generally expected.

6. Spam complaint rate

Definition:
Spam complaint rate measures the percentage of recipients who go beyond unsubscribing and actively report your email as spam, believing it to be unsolicited or irrelevant.
This may happen if your brand name has changed and is no longer recognizable, if you haven’t contacted recipients for a long time and they’ve forgotten they opted in, or if they strongly object to the content of your message. Regardless of the reason, you should aim to keep spam complaint rates as close to zero as possible, as they directly impact sender reputation and email deliverability.

What should your spam complaint rate be?
If zero is not achievable, these are the benchmarks you should aim for:

• Excellent: below 0,01%
• Acceptable: between 0,01% and 0,1%
• Poor: above 0,1%
• Critical: above 0,3%, as this is likely to trigger deliverability issues and/or blacklisting by email service providers (ESPs)