Email reporting masterclass

According to our 2025 Messaging Trends Report which analyzed B2C traffic from both global enterprise brands and small businesses, email is still one of the pillar channels used to communicate with customers and prospects.

Whether you’re a marketing professional running campaigns, or have an operational role where you need to ensure that customers receive critical updates like policy documents or legal notices, email is often the best channel to use.

Email reporting provides the insights needed to evaluate performance, optimize future sends, and ensure your messages are reaching and resonating with your audience. In this blog, we’ll explore the most important email metrics, why they matter, and how to interpret them in different contexts.

Why email reporting matters

Email reporting can provide so much more than a dashboard of stats that you refer to occasionally. When used effectively, it can provide a live feedback loop that enables you to make changes and adjustments on the fly to significantly improve deliverability and campaign performance.

From adjusting the throttle rate of deployments as they go out, to using AB testing to choose the best combination of subject line, creative, and CTA to maximize click-throughs and engagement rates. Email reporting enables businesses to proactively improve their communication and customer engagement.

Without paying close attention to email reporting stats, you’re essentially sending messages into a void. With it, you gain visibility, accountability, and the ability to improve.

Key email reporting metrics

These are the six most important stats that you should be tracking.

1. Delivery rate

What is it?

This is the percentage of emails in a deployment that were successfully delivered to recipients’ inboxes.

How is it calculated?

((Emails sent – emails that bounced)/Emails sent) x 100

For example, if you send 5000 emails and 100 bounce then the calculation would be ((5000-100)/5000) x 100 = 96%

What is a ‘good’ email delivery rate?

With high quality list data, email addresses that have been validated, and by following email deliverability and sender reputation best practice, you should be looking to achieve delivery rates as close to 100% as possible – although anything over 96% is considered excellent.

2. Open rate

What is it?

Open rate is the percentage of delivered emails that were actually opened by recipients.

It is a key indicator of subject line effectiveness and for marketers, how well they are segmenting their audience and targeting people based on the thigs they are interested in.

For operational emails, it shows if recipients are actually seeing important communications.

How is it calculated?

(Emails opened)/Emails delivered) x 100

For example, if 4000 emails are delivered and 800 are opened then the calculation would be (800/4000) x 100 = 20%

What is a ‘good’ email open rate?

Sending high quality email content to your most engaged customers will result in the highest open rates, but in general above 20% for marketing emails, and above 50% for transactional messages would be considered good.

3. Bounce rate

What is it?

Bounce rate is the percentage of sent emails that could not be delivered for one reason or another. Bounces are categorized as either ‘hard’ or ‘soft’.

• Hard bounces are permanent and unsalvageable delivery failures – for example the email address doesn’t exist because it contains a typo, or the recipient’s email server blocked the message due to spam complaints or blacklisting (that particular message will never be delivered, but future messages may be if your domain gets unblocked).
• Soft bounces are temporary issues that delay the delivery of the message, for example the recipient’s inbox is full, the mail server is too busy or is down for maintenance, or the message exceeds the maximum size allowed by the receiving mail server.

A high bounce rate should be investigated quickly as it will affect your sender reputation, making email service providers more likely to block future messages.

How is email bounce rate calculated?

(Total emails bounced)/Total emails sent) x 100

For example, if 10,000 emails are sent and 100 bounce then the calculation would be (100/10000) x 100 = 1%

What would an acceptable bounce rate be?

With good list hygiene and using an email validation service you should be able to keep hard bounces close to zero. Soft bounces you have less control over, but overall, a bounce rate of less than 3% is desirable.

4. Click-through rate (CTR) and click-to-open rate (CTOR)

What is it?

Most email marketers differentiate between CTR and CTOR.

• CTR is the proportion of email clicks based on the number of emails delivered
• CTOR is the proportion of clicks based on the number of emails opened.

In other words, CTR tells you how many people clicked your email out of everyone you sent it to while CTOR tells you how many people clicked your email out of those who actually opened it.

So, CTR shows overall interest, while CTOR shows how engaging your email content was to those who actually read it.

You also need to make sure that your email software is not overcounting clicks – people could click the same link multiple times. You should differentiate between total clicks and total unique clicks when comparing the success of different email deployments.

How is click-through rate calculated?

((Total unique clicks/ Total emails delivered)/ Total emails delivered) x 100

or if you are calculating click-to-open-rate then:

(Total unique clicks/ Total emails opened)/ Total emails opened x 100

What CTR and CTOR should you be aiming for?

The benchmarks for Click-Through Rate and Click-To-Open Rate can vary a lot depending on industry, audience, and campaign type, but usually CTOR will be higher.

For CTR, anything above 5% would be considered excellent.

For CTOR, anything above 20% would be impressive.

5. Unsubscribe rate

What is it?

The unsubscribe rate is a metric that shows the percentage of recipients who opted out of receiving future emails from a particular mailing. i.e. they hit the ‘Unsubscribe’ link included in the email.

Unsubscribes are inevitable as customers’ circumstances change or their interest in the products and services that you provide wane. However, you can keep unsubscribes to a minimum by sending useful and targeted communication to engaged individuals.

How is unsubscribe rate calculated?

(Total unsubscribes/Total emails delivered) x 100

What should you keep unsubscribe rate under?

For a stable long term recipient list, an unsubscribe rate above 0.5% is cause for concern and may indicate that your email content and targeting needs improvement.

For an email list of fairly new subscribers – maybe those that have signed up for a promotion that you are running, a higher unsubscribe rate is expected.

6. Spam complaint rate

What is it?

This measures people that go a step further than simply unsubscribing and feel strongly enough to submit a spam complaint because they think that your message is unsolicited or completely irrelevant.

Perhaps your brand name has changed and they don’t recognize it, or it is someone that you haven’t mailed for so long that they have forgotten that they opted in. Or maybe the person really objects to the content of email that you have sent them. In any case, you should be looking to keep your spam complaint rate as close to zero as possible as it can impact your sender reputation.

How is spam complaint rate calculated?

(Total spam complaints/Total emails delivered) x 100

What should you keep spam complaint rate under?

If zero isn’t possible – here is what you should be aiming for:

• Excellent: Less than 0.01%
• Acceptable: Between 0.01% and 0.1%
• Poor: Above 0.1%
• Critical: Over 0.3% will likely trigger deliverability issues and/or blacklisting by ESPs