After you’ve sent your email pitches through Prowly, you can start tracking results—including open rates, click rates, and bounced messages. Just click on your mailing's name from the mailings you can see under Emails.
This will take you to Email Analytics:
See the information below about metrics included in Email Analytics.
Opens
Unique opens show you how many recipients opened your email pitch.
Total opens show you how many times your email was opened in total. If a single recipient opens your email twice, it's going to be reflected as one unique open but two total opens.
Open rate, on the other hand, is the percentage of recipients who have opened the email pitch at least once out of the recipients who got your message. The calculation formula is as follows:
Open rate = Unique opens / Delivered emails
Both Unique opens and Open Rates give you a good sense of the overall engagement with a specific email pitch and show you whether your subject lines are encouraging enough for the recipients to click on them.
Clicks
While Opens help you measure how many recipients opened your email pitch and at least looked at it, Total clicks measure how many people clicked on a link within your email pitch. Similarly to unique opens, unique clicks are counted as only one per recipient while total clicks may include several clicks from a single recipient.
Click Through Rate is the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email out of the people who opened your email pitch. The calculation formula is as follows:
Click through rate = Unique clicks / Unique opens
Click Rate is the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your email out of the people who received your email pitch. The calculation formula is as follows:
Click rate = Unique clicks / Delivered emails
Clicks are quite important because they help you measure how effective your email pitches are when it comes to convincing the email recipients to take action (i.e. see a specific press release or visit a newsroom).
If you notice lots of opens but not as many clicks, you might want to experiment with email content, formatting, and your call-to-action.
Delivered/Not delivered
An email mat be not delivered when your message is rejected by the recipient’s email server and gets bounced back to your server. When that happens, you receive an error email indicating that your message failed to deliver to your intended recipient.
Even though bounced emails are annoying, they are also quite frequent. A bounce rate (meaning the percentage of your emails that get bounced back to you) of less than 2% is still acceptable, but anything above that should raise your suspicion. In fact, the higher the bounce rate, the more damage it can do to your reputation as a sender.
Delivered emails = Emails sent - Bounced emails
By measuring the deliverability of your email pitches, you can keep an eye on the quality of your media list and your reputation as a sender, which ultimately affects your media pitching efforts.
What else should you know about email pitch analytics?
- Depending on the email service provider, you might have access to different metrics. Keep in mind that not every provider calculates all these metrics the same way!
- Some email pitches will perform better than others. Depending on your relationship with the recipients and their areas of interest, you will most likely see different results from different email pitches. That’s precisely why you should segment your media list and tailor email pitches to specific recipients.
- Don’t be so hard on yourself. Average open and click rates will vary from one PR outreach campaign to another, and some of them will be satisfactory even if they don’t seem like it at first. According to industry leaders, the open rate of email send-outs is around 20%
Take into account that assessing the effectiveness of your PR efforts based on the results of one mailing is practically impossible. Use the insights found in Prowly to optimise your email pitches and plan your PR outreach accordingly.