Tracking the results of an email blast is an important step for an organization in order to determine not only the success of the campaign, but also to plan for future blasts. Open rates, click through rates, unsubscribes and bounces all give information about how your constituents are interacting with your email message, if at all. Most email blast programs, such as Vertical Response or Constant Contact, can track and generate reports on open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates and bounces. However, some of these statistics can be flawed due to how they collect their information, so they should not be regarded as concrete data.

To collect information about open rates, email programs like Vertical Response place small, one-pixel pictures into the html email message and count the number of times it is called for from the server, in effect counting the number of times the email is opened. However, this process does encounter a few stumbling blocks. For example, those members that open the text version of the message are not counted. Click through rates, on the other hand give a different piece of information. An organization can feel fairly certain that a person has read their email if the recipient has clicked on the offered action. So using an email program to look at a combination of open rate and click-through rate should give you a pretty good, if not perfectly accurate, reading on the success of your email blast.

For additional references and resources, check out these links:

• http://www.idealware.org/articles/email_metrics.php
• http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2395/all-about-email-open-rates/
• http://www.onenw.org/images/comparison-matrix.gif