Email Analytics: 7 Metrics Every Sender Should Track

Sending emails without tracking metrics is like running a business without looking at the numbers. You might feel like things are going well, but you have no way to prove it and no foundation for improvement.

The challenge isn't a lack of data — it's knowing which metrics actually matter. There are dozens of email stats you could track, but most of them are noise. Here are the seven that give you a clear, actionable picture of your email performance.

1. Open Rate

Open rate measures the percentage of delivered emails that recipients opened. It's the most commonly tracked email metric and the first indicator of whether your emails are getting attention.

Formula: (Unique Opens / Delivered Emails) x 100

Why it matters: Open rate reflects the effectiveness of your subject line and sender name — the two things recipients see before deciding whether to open. A declining open rate signals that you're losing relevance in your recipients' inboxes.

What to aim for: Industry averages range from 15-35%, depending on the sector. Transactional emails naturally perform higher (60-80%). For a deep dive into optimization strategies, see our complete guide to email open rate.

Caveats: Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates open rates for Apple Mail users. Image blocking in corporate email clients creates false negatives. Treat open rate as a directional indicator, not an exact count.

2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate measures the percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one link in your email. Unlike open rate, CTR requires deliberate action and is much harder to inflate artificially.

Formula: (Unique Clicks / Delivered Emails) x 100

Why it matters: CTR is the closest proxy for engagement quality. If someone clicked a link, they read your email, found something interesting, and took action. That's meaningful.

What to aim for: 2-5% for marketing emails, 10-20% for transactional. Also track Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR = Clicks / Opens) for a purer measure of content effectiveness. We cover this in detail in our click-through rate guide.

With Mailpulse, you can see not just overall CTR but which specific links are getting clicked. This tells you what content resonates and which CTAs actually drive action.

3. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate measures the percentage of sent emails that couldn't be delivered. Bounces fall into two categories:

• Hard bounces: permanent delivery failures. The email address doesn't exist, the domain is invalid, or the recipient server has permanently rejected the message.
• Soft bounces: temporary delivery failures. The recipient's mailbox is full, the server is temporarily down, or the message is too large.

Formula: (Bounced Emails / Sent Emails) x 100

Why it matters: A high bounce rate damages your sender reputation. Email providers track how many emails from your domain bounce, and a high rate suggests you're sending to unverified or outdated lists. This can push all your emails toward spam.

What to aim for: Below 2% total, with hard bounces under 0.5%. If you're consistently above these thresholds, you need to clean your list.

Action items:

• Remove hard bounces immediately — never retry them
• Monitor soft bounces and remove addresses that consistently fail
• Implement double opt-in for new subscribers to validate addresses upfront

4. Unsubscribe Rate

Unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of recipients who opted out of your emails after receiving a message.

Formula: (Unsubscribes / Delivered Emails) x 100

Why it matters: Some unsubscribes are normal and even healthy — you want an engaged list, not a large one. But a sudden spike in unsubscribes signals a problem: your content missed the mark, you're emailing too frequently, or you added people who didn't expect to hear from you.

What to aim for: Below 0.5% per email send. If you're consistently above 1%, something needs to change.

One important note: unsubscribe rate only counts people who actively clicked the unsubscribe link. Many more people disengage silently by simply ignoring future emails. That's why you also need to monitor engagement over time (metric #6).

5. Delivery Rate

Delivery rate measures the percentage of sent emails that actually reached the recipient's server (inbox or spam folder — not just inbox).

Formula: (Delivered Emails / Sent Emails) x 100

Why it matters: If your emails aren't being delivered, nothing else matters. Delivery rate is the foundation metric — everything else depends on it.

What to aim for: 97% or higher. If you're below 95%, you likely have authentication issues, list quality problems, or reputation damage.

How to improve it:

• Set up proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records
• Use a custom tracking domain aligned with your sending domain
• Clean your list regularly
• Maintain consistent sending patterns
• Monitor blacklist status

Mailpulse tracks delivery and bounce events automatically when you send through the platform, giving you real-time visibility into your delivery rate.

6. Engagement Over Time

This isn't a single metric — it's the practice of tracking how your metrics change across campaigns and time periods. It's arguably more important than any individual number.

Why it matters: A snapshot tells you where you are. A trend tells you where you're heading. If your open rate has been steady at 25% for six months, that's a stable baseline. If it dropped from 25% to 18% over the last three months, you have a problem that needs investigation.

What to track:

• Open rate trend (weekly or monthly)
• CTR trend
• List growth rate vs. unsubscribe rate
• Best-performing send days and times
• Engagement by campaign type (newsletter vs. transactional vs. promotional)

The Mailpulse dashboard provides engagement charts that show daily opens and clicks over configurable time periods. This makes it easy to spot trends without exporting data to spreadsheets.

7. Device and Geographic Analytics

Understanding where and how your recipients read your emails shapes your design and content decisions.

Device breakdown: What percentage of your audience reads on mobile vs. desktop? This determines whether you need a mobile-first email design (if mobile is above 50%) or can afford more complex layouts.

Browser and OS: Knowing that 40% of your audience uses Apple Mail tells you that a significant portion of your open data might be affected by Mail Privacy Protection. If 30% uses Outlook, you know to test your emails in Outlook's rendering engine, which is notoriously quirky.

Geographic distribution: Where are your recipients? This affects send time optimization (you might need to account for multiple time zones), language considerations, and content relevance.

Mailpulse's analytics dashboard breaks down all of this automatically from tracking data. You see device types, operating systems, browsers, and top countries in visual reports without any additional setup.

Putting It All Together

No single metric tells the full story. The power comes from looking at metrics in combination:

• High open rate + low CTR = great subject lines but weak content or unclear CTAs
• Low open rate + high unsubscribe rate = your emails are being perceived as spam before they're even opened (likely a sender reputation issue)
• High CTR + low conversion = your email is compelling but your landing page isn't (look beyond email metrics)
• Rising bounce rate = list hygiene problem that needs immediate attention

Getting Started

If you're currently sending emails without tracking, you're missing the feedback loop that makes improvement possible. Setting up tracking doesn't have to be complex.

With Mailpulse, you can add tracking to any email — whether sent through n8n workflows, your application's API, or any SMTP provider. The free plan includes 3,000 tracked emails per month with access to all core analytics.

Start by establishing your baselines. Track these seven metrics for 4-6 weeks without making changes. Once you have a baseline, you'll know exactly where to focus your optimization efforts.

Create your free Mailpulse account and start measuring what matters.