Elastic Email activity logs include two main metrics - opens and clicks. These are very important statistics that can clearly demonstrate the success level of your campaigns.

The open rate is a basic percentage of delivered-to-opened email rate. It tells you how many of your subscribers have opened a successfully delivered email in a straightforward way.

Every email that you send via Elastic Email has a tiny, invisible pixel included. It's called a "tracking pixel". It's not visible in your everyday transactions so it never affects your planned email design. When your customer opens the email, and it is fully loaded from top to bottom (including the pixel), the email is counted as "opened".

In some cases, email software blocks displaying images. When this happens, a tracking pixel is not displayed and thus an open is not counted. However, in order to offset this, Elastic Email also counts clicks - every instance of your recipient clicking any link present in your emails.

The tracking pixel will also not be displayed in plain-text emails as they do not pass any content aside from simple text. No images or other HTML content is present here.

Open and click rates are a great way to track if your recent campaigns were resonating well with your customer base. Things like subject lines or pre-headers are the first things your customers see when they receive your emails. When they find them interesting or relevant, it will result in more opens from them and indicate that you know your recipients well enough to create content they are interested in engaging with.

A low open rate is usually caused by one of the following:

There are several ways of approaching these problems.

Subject line is the first thing your recipients see when your email arrives in their inbox. It's best to make sure your email's subject is as cohesive, short and descriptive as possible.

You can test several ides for subject lines with the help of A/B split tests.

We also have a blog post that covers the topic of improving your subject line extensively. You can read more about great hints on this topic here.

One of the keys to creating a well performing campaign is to know your target audience. Sending specific, topic-oriented emails to an audience that is not interested in it may lead to a lack of interest or even frustration that ends up in marking your messages as complaint.

Elastic Email offers great segmentation tools to help you manage your subscribers in the most effective way possible. With this, you will be able to tailor your various campaign to any specific audience you design on your account.

Static lists will hold your contacts for as long as you decide after placing them in one. You can revisit these lists any time and count on the fact that it will remain in the same state you left it in to tweak the contacts placed there according to your current needs.

Dynamic segments are determined by specific rules (or queries). When a contact meets this rule, it will be automatically placed in such segment. When it no longer applies, it will be thrown out of this segment. This mechanism gives you a more dynamic and automated way of contact management that may apply for your very specific needs - multiple rules can be applied to narrow down very unique scenarios.

The following articles will provide you with more information on contact segmentation:

Contact lists and segments

Segment rules

Sending emails to recipients that are no longer interested in you interacting with them will obviously result in a drop of open rates.

In order to mitigate this, you can easily take care of excluding the least engaged contacts from your future campaigns thanks to the Contact pruning mechanism.

When Contact Pruning is enabled on your account, contacts are automatically blocked after a specified number of emails are sent with 0 opens.

This is a great way to automate at least a part of your day-to-day contact list management.

You can read more about contact pruning here.

This part is also influenced by your knowledge of your key audience. When you send too many or not enough emails to your recipients (based on their perceived needs), your contacts can either miss your emails or get frustrated by a volume that is too high and stop responding. Monitoring your recipients' responses to your campaigns may help you better plan for the future and tweak the frequency to satisfy the needs of your audience.

Always adapt your sending patterns to your current strategy.

You can read more about optimizing your sending patterns in our Delivery Guide.

Click rates indicate if your emails are interesting enough for your recipients to interact with the content you're sending. In order to maintain good click rates, you will have to double-down on creating content that is enticing to your chosen audience. There are several things to look into when considering click rate improvement.

Make sure your links are visible and as relevant to your contacts as possible. Using general phrases like "Click here" are often off-putting or confusing, especially for mobile users as no "clicking" happens on a phone. Try to arrange your link text to be directly referring to what are you conveying in your email message. Let your customers know where they will be redirected exactly after clicking through.

Sometimes your users scroll through your emails in a hurry. In cases like this, a single instance of a particular link may be overlooked or intentionally skipped. However, if more instances of the same link are placed in a single email, it increases the chances of the link being clicked. It is especially useful in emails that contain just a single call to action link, like "Subscribe".

Just as with open rate testing, you can create special A/B split campaigns in order to test several of your email link designs for clicks. This way you will be able to see which one is the most enticing to your recipients. After the testing period is done, the winning template will be clearly marked on your campaign results page.