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Understand the results of your email blast

Learn how to read your email engagement metrics — open rate, bounce rate, etc. — so that you can improve your blasts' performance

Updated over 2 years ago

Table of Contents

Email stats for single blast

Find these stats by going to Communication > [Broadcaster name] > Email and locate the sent email blast. Hover over the blast and click on Edit next to the email blast or click on the Name of the Email Blast.

Stats will appear in the Dashboard of your email blast:

  • Sent: Total number of recipients that were sent the email blast.

  • Opened: Recipients who we have verified opened the email.

    • Some mailbox providers do not load image files by default, We use a tiny invisible pixel to track when a recipient opens a blast, so if images are disabled, the open cannot be counted.

    • Recipients who use Apple Mail can enable a privacy setting that will load the open tracking pixel upon delivery. Because of this, we cannot verify the legitimacy of these open activities, so we exclude them from the Opened total and rate calculation.

  • Clicked: Recipients who clicked on a link within the email.

  • Donated: Contributions raised after a recipient clicked a link from your email blast. This statistic is only tracked on NationBuilder pages, not third party sites.

  • Bounced: Recipients whose email addressed were rejected due to presumed temporary errors (ex: "user is over quota" or "mailbox temporarily disabled")

    • Certain types of bounces can indicate permanent delivery problems, so an email address will be marked as "bad" after 7 bounces of this variety.

  • Bad: Recipients whose email addresses were rejected due to a permanent error (ex: "No such user at this address") or have returned a particular type of bounce error 7 times (see Bounced description).

    • Emails that are marked as "bad" in response to an email blast will no longer be emailable going forward. A recipient who has no valid email addresses on their profile will be opted out of all further email blast communication.

    • If you believe an email address was designated as "bad" in error, please contact [email protected].

  • Spam reported: Recipients who have marked your email as spam.

  • Unsubscribed: People who have clicked the unsubscribe link in your email and opted out of receiving further email communication.

Links: If your email includes any hyperlinks, you will see them listed below your email stats. To their right, you'll find "First click," indicating both the number and percentage of times the link was the first one clicked by recipients; and "Clicks," indicating both the number and percentage of overall clicks on that link by recipients.

View recipients in each status

You can also see a listing of individual recipients in each engagement status bucket under the Recipients section of the blast:

In addition to the above statuses, this view includes the following additional tabs:

  • Unopened: Recipients who did not open the email.

  • Open unverified: Recipients whose use of Apple Mail Privacy Protection prevented the collection of open data. Recipients will be recategorized as opened as they click on links within the blast or open the email through a different email client.

  • Unclicked: Recipients who did not click a link in your email. This number includes anyone who did not open the email.   

From any given tab in this view, you can create a new list and add everyone displayed to it. For example, you might add everyone in Recipients > Unopened to a list, and then use that list to target a second "kicker" email scheduled a few days later.

📌 Pro-tip: If you go to Recipients > Bounced, you can see the raw status codes/error messages returned to us by the intended recipient's mailbox provider. Reviewing these can help diagnose possible email deliverability problems.

Aggregate email stats for nation

To see aggregate email engagement stats for your nation during a given window of time, go to Communication > Email stats: 

The stat boxes at the top of this dashboard show cumulative email engagement data for all blasts sent by any broadcaster in your nation: 

  • Total sent: Total number of individual emails sent over the course of the selected window of time. For example, if you sent 2 blasts in the last 30 days, each to a list of 100 recipients — then your "Total sent" stat box would read 200.

  • Opened: Total amount of opens during during the selected window of time.

  • Clicked: Total amount of hyperlink clicks during the selected window of time. 

  • Unsubscribed: Total number of people who unsubscribed during the selected window of time.

  • Bounced: Total amount of bounces during the selected window of time.

  • Bad: Total number of recipients who's email address was flagged "bad" during the selected window of time.

  • Spam: Total number of times that a recipient marked one of your email blasts as "spam" during the selected window of time.

If you would like to view engagement stats for a different date range — "All time", "Last 90 days", "1 quarter ago", etc. — then click "Last 30 days" and toggle to a different option using the drop-down menu. All the stats in this view will update accordingly.

Below the cumulative, nation-wide email engagement stat boxes is a table that breaks this data down by broadcaster. Each rows includes the broadcaster name, how many blasts were sent from it during the selected date-range, along with the above combined stats for all of those blasts.

📌 Pro-tip: this view is particularly helpful if your team uses multiple broadcasters to organize and send-out email blasts, as it makes it easy to see at a glance how each of those senders is performing relative to the others.


When your email blast is queued

A blast is considered queued as NationBuilder processes all the email addresses with their respective content to be sent out for a particular blast. 

A blast is typically sent out within a minute or two after being submitted but can take up to 15 minutes if the list of recipients is exceptionally large.

Do not send out a duplicate blast if the original blast is queued. NationBuilder is processing your original blast and will send out both emails if you try to send a duplicate blast.

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