📋 What you'll need: Your email tool's reporting, and the Results Log tab in Spreadsheet 6
⏱ Time: 15 minutes a month
✅ Output: A clear read on what's working, based on the one number that tells you the truth
⏱ Time: 15 minutes a month
✅ Output: A clear read on what's working, based on the one number that tells you the truth
Email reporting shows you a lot of numbers. Many of them don't matter, and one of them will actively mislead you. This page is short on purpose: look at the right number, ignore the wrong one, check it once a month, log it, and move on.
The Number That Actually Matters
Click rate. The percentage of people who clicked a link in your email. It's the number to judge everything on, because a click is a real action a real person chose to take.
Why click rate, and not open rate
Open rate used to be the headline number. It's now broken, and here's why. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection — used by nearly half of all email readers — automatically loads every email in the background, which registers as an "open" whether or not the person ever looked at it. Bots and security scanners do the same. The result: anywhere from 15% to 50% of the "opens" in your report never happened.
So a high open rate tells you almost nothing. A click, on the other hand, is a deliberate action — someone read your email and chose to act. That's why click rate is the number to trust.
There's one thing open rate is still good for: if it suddenly drops by a lot, that's an early sign of a deliverability problem — your emails may be going to spam. Watch it for that, and nothing else.
💡 What a healthy click rate looks like.
- For a regular email you send to your whole list, roughly 2% to 3% is a solid click rate, and above 3% is strong
- Your automated sequences will run much higher — often two or three times that — because they reach people at the moment they're paying attention.
- Don't compare the two; a welcome sequence and a monthly email are different jobs. Judge each against itself over time.
The Two Numbers That Protect Your List
Two more numbers are worth watching. They don't measure how well your email performed. They tell you whether you're about to get blocked from sending at all.
Unsubscribes, bounces, and spam complaints
Unsubscribe rate. Somewhere around 0.2% to 0.5% per email is normal and healthy — a few people out of every thousand. People leaving keeps your list clean. Only worry if it climbs well above that, which usually means you're emailing too often or the content isn't landing.
Bounce rate. The percentage of emails that couldn't be delivered, usually because the address is dead. Keep this under 2%. This isn't just a performance number any more — Gmail and Microsoft now block senders whose bounce rate goes over 2%. Clean your list, and never buy one.
Spam complaints. The percentage of people who mark your email as spam. Keep this under 0.3%, for the same reason — cross it and you get blocked. The way to keep it low is simple: only email people who asked to hear from you, make unsubscribing easy, and don't send too often.
⚠️ Bounces and spam complaints are now pass/fail.
It used to be that a high bounce or complaint rate just dragged your performance down. As of 2026, Gmail and Microsoft reject email outright from senders who cross their limits — a 2% bounce rate or a 0.3% complaint rate. This is why the deliverability setup on the platform page matters, and why a clean list beats a big one every time. If your emails suddenly stop landing, check these two numbers first.
Your Monthly Check
What to do, once a month
Fifteen minutes, once a month. Open your email tool's reporting and your Results Log (Spreadsheet 6, Results Log tab).
- Log the click rate for each email you sent and each sequence that's running. This builds your own baseline — after a few months, you'll know what normal looks like for you, which is worth more than any industry average.
- Note which subject lines got the most clicks. Do more of what works. Your own results teach you more about your list than any rule ever will.
- Glance at unsubscribes, bounces, and spam complaints. As long as they're inside the healthy ranges, move on. If any is climbing, that's your signal to send less often or clean your list.
- Look at your sequences. Your welcome and post-purchase sequences should be your strongest performers. If one is clicking well below the others, that's the one to rewrite next.
📌 Track your own baseline, not the industry's.
Every list is different. The most useful comparison isn't you against some published average — it's this month against your last few months. Your Results Log builds that picture over time, so you can see whether you're improving, which emails pull their weight, and which need work.
What You've Built
✅ You can read your results when:
- You judge every email on click rate
- You ignore open rate except as a deliverability warning
- You keep unsubscribes, bounces, and spam complaints inside their healthy ranges
- You log your numbers in Spreadsheet 6 each month to build your own baseline.
Made with Bullet