Using Campaign Management & Understanding Statistics

Quick Steps: Members > Send Email > Campaign Management

1. Select Members from the top menu, then Send Email from the left menu.

2. Select Campaign Management from the expanded menu.

3. Once an email campaign has been sent, it will move into Incomplete. The email will remain in this status until all emails have been sent to the selected recipients. The results of the send can be viewed by going to the Complete status.
An export of these members can be downloaded by clicking on the statistic.

Sent: Is the number of emails that were sent

Hard: A hard bounce back is where the email address does not exist. The spelling could be incorrect or the member’s email may have been cancelled. A hard bounce back email will automatically be deleted from the email database.

Soft: A soft bounce back is where the member’s mail box may be full or the email has been prevented because of spam filters, or server restrictions. Soft bounces will not be deleted from the database. The server will attempt to resend the email for 72 hours.

Opt Out: This shows how many members clicked the unsubscribe button on the email that was sent, these opt out members are automatically deleted from the email database.

Links: If you have included external links in your email, this will display the number of clicks on each link. This is a great way to track marketing success and also analyse the content that interests your members.

Info: Provides details of the groups of recipients the email campaign was sent to, as well as the ability to view a copy of the email that was sent.

Delete: Deletes the history of the campaign being sent.


Additional Information:
You may experience delays with your email moving from Incomplete to Complete, this is due to other traffic going through the email server. Please be patient and allow up to half a day for the email campaign to send.

Tracking Links
Unlike other email distribution software, the tracking links are automatically appended to every link that is included in your email. You don't have to manually create the tracking links, just set up the hyperlinks as per normal.

Please note that the number reported will be the number of clicks, rather than the unique number of people to have clicked on the link. If a member does click a link three times, this will record as three clicks.

Open Rates
Open rates are not an exact science. Standard practice is for the email to include a small image (not visible to the reader) within the email that is downloaded from the email server, when that image is downloaded an "open" is recorded.

This means that an email must be read in HTML format in order for an open to be recorded, consider the following email clients -

Microsoft Outlook

Outlook is the most commonly used business email client. Later versions of Outlook have been blocking images by default.  If an email is viewed without downloading the images, an open will not be recorded. 

Also consider the preview pane in Outlook. Whilst a user may well have image download set to automatic, he/she may simply be moving through their email list and click on your email without reading it, this will however record an Open.



Web Email

Web based email systems such as Gmail and Yahoo also operate in a similar fashion to Outlook.



Mobile Devices

Mobile devices such as Blackberry open all email in Plain Text format. Therefore anyone reading your email on this platform would not count as an open.

Finally consider, as Spam Filters become more sophisticated and people are being increasingly overwhelmed by email and therefore being more selective on what they are reading.

Open rates are great for looking at short term trends and will give you a good understanding of whether shifts in your email practices are working (EG moving from a Monday send to a Tuesday send) but should not be treated as gospel.