Understanding your Campaign Report
Every campaign you send gets a detailed report. It tells you not just how many people opened or clicked, but who and what they did. Here is what each number actually means and the gotchas to watch for.
Top-line metrics
The report card at the top of every campaign shows five percentages:
| Metric | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Open rate | Share of recipients who opened the email. Image-based - see the caveats below. |
| Click rate | Share of recipients who clicked a link in the email. |
| Bounce rate | Share of sent emails that bounced. Hard bounces are removed from your list automatically. |
| Unsubscribe rate | Share of recipients who unsubscribed. |
| Spam complaint rate | Share of recipients who marked the email as spam. AWS's recommended ceiling is 0.1%. |
Per-recipient event data
For every recipient on the campaign, Mailblast records a timestamp for each engagement event: open, click, bounce, unsubscribe, spam complaint. You can see these on the recipients table at the bottom of the report and export the full list as CSV via the Export Recipients button.
The report also shows:
- Top clicked links - which URLs got the most clicks, with unique and total counts
- Opens by country - geographic distribution based on IP geolocation of the open events
To send a follow-up to engaged or unengaged subscribers, use the engagement-based targeting option on a new campaign.
What "healthy" looks like
There are no universal benchmarks - open and click rates in particular vary wildly by industry, audience, and list maturity. The numbers you should not exceed are the ones AWS sets: bounce rate above 10% and complaint rate above 0.5% can pause your sending. Aim well under AWS's recommended ceilings of 5% bounce and 0.1% complaint.
For your own engagement metrics (opens, clicks, unsubscribes), the right baseline is your own past campaigns. If a single send is well outside your usual range, treat it as a signal: did something change about the audience, the subject line, or the content? If your rolling average is drifting in the wrong direction over several campaigns, that is the signal to act.
When numbers do not match what you expect
A few common causes:
- Open rate suddenly jumped 10+ points: Apple Mail Privacy Protection is now reading every email; not a real change in engagement
- Click rate higher than open rate: a recipient clicked a link without their mail client loading images; normal at small scale
- Bounce rate spiked on a single campaign: usually means you sent to an old segment that has decayed - clean the list and re-engage active subscribers only