Once you start an email marketing campaign, Vendasta tracks how recipients engage with the campaign to help you make insightful decisions. When you open a campaign, you can view how many recipients received, opened, and clicked through each email in the campaign. You can also view how many times an email bounced, or how many recipients unsubscribed from an email.
All activity is always attributed to the original recipient, even though external processes and systems can sometimes initiate the activity. There are no clear indicators to differentiate if these activities are initiated by a human or an automated program, resulting in some Open Rates or Click-Through Rates (CTRs) being falsely registered on behalf of the recipient. Here are some common reasons why that may happen:
- Third-party unsubscribe links: Our email campaigns contain an unsubscribe link. When this link is clicked, it only registers as an “unsubscribe” and not as a click. However, many email clients nowadays have the option to ask the recipient to unsubscribe from suspected spam/newsletter emails. If the recipient unsubscribes using these third-party links, it registers with a click.
- Recipient email client settings: An email's open rate is recorded with a single tracking pixel embedded into the email. Usually, this tracking pixel is associated with an image. A recipient’s email client may block loading images to protect the recipient from spammers. If the email client blocks loading images, the open rate is not tracked.
- Spam and virus scanners: Some internet service providers (ISP) click on links within an email to check for security risks. When this happens, the clicks are recorded on behalf of the recipient.
Unfortunately, these external initiations are out of our control. To maintain accurate email metrics, we recommend identifying domains that skew campaign metrics and segmenting those domains from your analysis.