FreshMail puts powerful analytical tools to work for you so you can measure every aspect of the effectiveness of your email campaigns. The information that you will find on your 'Reports' page gives you a detailed insight into how your subscribers are reacting to your message. Using this data, you can then develop your next campaign with a better knowledge of what works for you, what doesn't and how you can use past subscriber behavior to optimize important metrics in the future. 

Your Open Rate

Tracking the Open RateOpen rate (OR)Procentowy wskaźnik, który pokazuje stosunek unikalnie wyświetlonych wiadomości do wiadomości wysłanych. of your emails is the first measure of the effectiveness of any email campaign. FreshMail's 'Reports' page will clearly show you your Open Rate but it's important that you understand how our system knows that the mail was or wasn't opened because this can help you to to make changes that can result in more opened messages. 

FreshMail can detect whether or not an email was opened by detecting elements that were placed in the message when it was created. 

Tracking pictures

The first method is to ‘append’ to each message a tiny image of just 1 x 1 px, which is read by the system when it is downloaded and counted as an opened email. The name of such a picture is generated and unique for each email in the database and that's how you can tell if a particular subscriber opened the email.

Unfortunately, this way of measuring has its drawbacks. This is due to the fact that most email programs, both installed on computers (Outlook) and web-based (Gmail), automatically block the downloading and displaying of graphics, including the small graphic mentioned here. What’s more, if your campaign contains only text, it's unlikely that any recipient will click the ‘download graphics’ option.

How to deal with this

There are two ways to get around these obstacles.

• It is a good idea to persuade subscribers to mark you as a trusted sender from the first mail they receive from you. 
• When creating your email it is worth adding something to remind recipients that they can adjust their settings so that graphics will be displayed. 

We know from experience that this type of actions can increase the effectiveness of certain campaigns by up to 30 per cent! 

Tracking link

The FreshMail system also allows you to track clicks on links included in your email. This information not only gives you information about the overall interest in the link but also enables you to use this information to form segments in your database for targeted campaigns in the future. 

It's important to utilize links in your email marketing campaigns and you should use them in a way that maximizes the chances of them being clicked on by your recipient. Probably the most obvious way to do this is to not show the URL address itself in the text of your mail, but instead to have it hyperlinked to simple text like 'click here', 'download document' etc. You can often improve your click rate by hyperlinking to an image as well. 

With the feedback you get from email marketing campaigns, you can trace and analyze a number of other indicators and metrics. In addition to the Open Rate, FreshMail's reporting system gives you detailed results regarding the number of sent mails to a particular address, the number of emails that were not received due to hard and soft 'bounces', link clicks sand unsubscribes.

Tracking unsubscribes

Remember that a clear and easily accessible resignation link is a requirement of professional email marketing standards, FreshMail's moderation system and, in many jurisdictions, the relevant legal authorities. The number and rate of unsubscribes from your campaigns are available in FreshMail's reports but there are no standard, recognized quantitative standards by which to judge them. Until such a formulation exists, we have to follow a simple logic - the lower the ratio, the better. It's important to remember that while you may do your best to create attractive and informative messages, there will always be unsubscribes from your recipient list no matter what.