Your 10 Minute Rep™: the email marketing metrics actually worth looking at
You send an email.
You check the report.
48% open rate.
Amazing… right?
Maybe.
Open rate is still useful information, but it shouldn’t be the number you use alone to decide whether an email worked.
Here’s why.
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection can download email content in the background, rather than only when someone physically opens and reads an email.
In very simple terms: someone can sometimes appear in your reporting as an “open” without sitting there reading your email. So that lovely open rate might not tell you quite as much as you think it does.
The better question is:
What did people do next?
And that’s what we’re looking at in this week’s 10 Minute Rep™.
First: open your last 3–5 emails
Go into whichever platform you use – Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Flodesk, Kit or similar – and pull up the reporting for your last three to five campaigns.
You’re not trying to become a data analyst. You’re looking for patterns.
Spend 10 minutes comparing what people actually did after your emails landed in their inbox.
Look at your clicks
Did people click through to your:
- website
- product
- service
- booking page
- article
- offer
- social account
A click requires more intent than simply appearing as an open. Now look at what they clicked. Was it the main button? A text link? A product image? Something halfway down the email?
This starts telling you what your audience is actually interested in.
Look at your replies
Replies are one of my favourite things to look at because they’re easy to overlook.
Did someone hit reply?
Ask a question?
Tell you they loved something?
Request more information?
Book because of the email?
An email that generates genuine conversation could be doing a very good job even if another campaign has prettier vanity metrics.
Look at your unsubscribes
An unsubscribe is not automatically a disaster. People leave email lists. That’s normal.
What you want to notice is whether a particular email caused an unusual jump compared with what you normally see.
If it did, ask why.
Was the email more promotional than usual?
Was the topic irrelevant to part of your audience?
Are you emailing too frequently?
Was the subject line promising something the email didn’t deliver?
Don’t panic over one unsubscribe. Look for patterns.
And if you sell online, look further
If your platform can track purchases, bookings, leads or attributed revenue, look at those too. Because ultimately, the goal of email marketing probably isn’t to generate a beautiful open-rate graph.
It’s to move someone closer to doing something.
Now compare the emails
This is where the useful part starts.
Find the email that generated the strongest action and ask:
What was the subject line?
What was the topic?
What was the offer?
What was the call to action?
Where did I put the link?
Was the email short or long?
Was I teaching, selling, entertaining or telling a story?
Then look at the weakest-performing email and ask the same questions.
You’re trying to find clues.
Maybe your audience clicks whenever you share practical advice.
Maybe they respond brilliantly to one particular service.
Maybe your very designed newsletters get fewer clicks than your simple emails.
Maybe nobody cares about the topic you thought they would.
That information is far more valuable than looking at one percentage in isolation and thinking:
Cool. 48% opened it.
Instead, you can start saying:
My audience clicks when I talk about this.
They respond to this type of offer.
This CTA works.
This topic isn’t landing.
I should do more of this.
That’s how your analytics start improving your marketing.
YOUR 10 MINUTE EMAIL MARKETING CHECKLIST™
Pull up your last 3–5 email campaigns and work through this:
☐ Check your click rate
Which email generated the most clicks?
☐ Check what people clicked
Which buttons, links, products or offers got their attention?
☐ Check your replies
Which emails actually started conversations?
☐ Check your unsubscribes
Was anything noticeably higher or lower than normal?
☐ Check conversions if you can
Did the email generate sales, bookings, enquiries or another meaningful action?
☐ Find your best-performing email
What was the topic, subject line and offer?
☐ Look at the CTA
What did you ask people to do — and where did you ask them?
☐ Compare the format
Was it short? Long? Educational? Promotional? Personal? Product-led?
☐ Find one pattern
What seems to consistently get your audience doing something?
☐ Use it in your next email
Take one thing you learned and deliberately repeat it.
Your 10 Minute Rep™
That’s it.
You do not need to spend hours analysing your email marketing. Give yourself 10 minutes.
Look at the last few emails.
Find the behaviour.
Find the pattern.
Then use what you learned.
Because instead of asking:
“How many people opened my email?”
I want you to start asking:
“What did they do next?”
That’s the metric that makes your next email better.
Want more 10 Minute Reps™? Follow Unpublished Marketing for small marketing jobs you can actually get done this week.
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