An email marketing report should help you decide which emails to continue, what to change, and where to check the data. That requires delivery metrics, recipient actions, business outcomes, and subscriber losses.
Define the campaign goal before sending. An email with a useful resource, a product offer, and a consultation invitation may have different primary outcomes. An open rate does not replace that goal.
Distinguish between selected recipients, messages actually sent, confirmed delivery, temporary delays, and final delivery failures. Some contacts may be excluded before sending, for example because they unsubscribed or have an invalid address.
A “delivered” status usually means the recipient's server accepted the email. It does not confirm placement in the primary inbox or that a person read it. This limitation is explicitly described in Brevo's delivery status documentation.
If delivery deteriorates, examine failure reasons by recipient domain and changes in list composition. Content and sales analysis will be incomplete while part of your audience is not receiving messages. A separate troubleshooting process is covered in our article on why newsletters go to spam.
Open tracking often relies on loading a tracking image. That measurement does not equal attentive reading. For example, Mail Privacy Protection in Apple Mail prevents senders from determining whether an email was opened. Apple's explanation.
Automated security checks and other systems can generate opens and clicks. Filtering helps remove some of these events, but cannot perfectly identify every action. Changing filtering settings can change the numbers without any change in audience behavior. Mailchimp's bot activity documentation.
Do not schedule a resend, delete a contact, or assess an individual's interest solely on the basis of an open or its absence. Consider the metric alongside clicks, replies, inquiries, and purchases.
The click-to-open rate also depends on the quality of open measurement. For the main report, it is more useful to track recipients who clicked as a share of delivered emails, supplemented by website actions.
A metric can have the same name while different services calculate it differently. Include the formulas in your own report:
These are definitions for your report. If your platform uses a different calculation, keep its original data and state the difference clearly. Mailchimp, for example, calculates its click rate relative to delivered emails. Mailchimp's metric definitions.
Do not add unique recipients across different links: one person may click several buttons. In a sequence report, also distinguish between the number of messages and the number of people. A buyer who received five messages must not be counted as five buyers.
Report spam complaints as a separate count and identify the data source. The email platform and mailbox provider may cover different populations and use different calculation bases.
Set consistent campaign names and UTM parameters. For example, a promotional email can use utm_medium=email for its channel and a dedicated campaign identifier for the particular message. The parameters are explained in Google Analytics documentation.
Do not include a recipient's email address, name, or phone number in UTM parameters. Google prohibits sending this identifying information to Analytics, including through campaign parameters. Google Analytics rules.
For the business, the subsequent sequence matters:
Define which system is the source for each outcome. The store may confirm payment, while the CRM records lead qualification and deal completion. The same event passed through several integrations must be counted only once.
Platform clicks do not have to match visits in analytics: repeated clicks, automated checks, measurement settings, and tracking availability all affect the figures. Use consistent UTM rules to track sources, and investigate discrepancies separately.
A store sent one email to 1,000 recipients. After the agreed delivery-checking period, the report showed 980 delivered emails. During the next seven days, it recorded:
In this example, the store attributes an order to the email if its click was the last recorded marketing visit before the purchase within seven days. This is an illustrative rule selected for the calculation, not a standard for every business.
The metrics are:
Suppose €300 remains after product costs and variable expenses for these orders, while preparing and sending the campaign cost €200. Under this calculation, €100 remains before other business expenses. Revenue of €1,000 alone does not establish the campaign's profitability.
If cancellations or refunds occur later, recalculate the result and state the update date. For B2B with a long decision cycle, report inquiries, their quality, and deals still open separately: a one-week window may be too short to evaluate sales.
Attribution shows which sales the report linked to the email under a particular rule. It does not prove those purchases would not have happened without the email. Several channels may contribute to one deal, and different systems may claim the same outcome.
State the observation window, sales attribution rule, source of the amounts, and treatment of refunds in your report. Do not add revenue independently attributed to several channels as if it were extra money for the business.
If list size and purchase volume allow, you can assess a marketing campaign's incremental effect using a comparable, randomly selected group that does not receive that campaign. Other conditions should be comparable, and required service messages must continue.
With few events, do not present the difference between groups as proven uplift. The data can inform further investigation without supporting a confident conclusion about a causal effect.
Use a short template:
Compare similar campaigns and segments after the same observation time. Note new audiences, frequency changes, sales promotions, and different event filtering in the report.
To set up email marketing, prepare your goals, existing reports, and data sources for inquiries and sales. The scope is outlined in our commercial proposal; agree on attribution rules and the necessary CRM integration before evaluating results.