If you’re sending email campaigns, you need to know what’s working—without getting buried in useless stats or shiny dashboards. This guide is for anyone who wants to get real results out of Mailscale, not just stare at charts all day. If you want to actually improve your campaigns (not just report on them), keep reading.
1. Set Up Tracking the Right Way
Before you can analyze anything, you need to make sure Mailscale is actually collecting the right data. Don’t assume it’s all on by default.
- Check your tracking settings: Go to your account settings and make sure open tracking, click tracking, and conversion tracking (if you’re using it) are enabled.
- Decide what you care about: Opens are fine, but they’re not everything (Apple Mail and privacy changes have made open rates less trustworthy). Clicks and conversions are much better signals.
- Add UTM parameters: If you want to see campaign results in Google Analytics or another analytics tool, make sure you’re using UTM parameters in your links. Mailscale lets you set these up automatically for each campaign, and it’s worth the extra minute.
- Test before you blast: Send a test email to yourself, click the links, and check that everything shows up in your reports. Don’t skip this. You’d be surprised how often tracking gets missed.
Pro tip: Don’t bother obsessing over open rates. They’re a rough signal at best, and sometimes just noise.
2. Launch Your Campaign (and Don’t Get Distracted)
Once your tracking is set, send your campaign as usual. Here’s what to ignore:
- Real-time dashboards: It’s tempting to watch the numbers roll in, but you don’t learn much in the first hour. Wait at least 24 hours before making any calls.
- Vanity metrics: High opens look nice, but if nobody’s clicking or converting, it doesn’t matter.
What matters: Actual engagement—clicks and conversions. Everything else is window dressing.
3. Dive Into Campaign Reports
Mailscale’s campaign reports give you a ton of data, but not all of it is useful. Here’s how to cut through the noise:
Find the Reports
- Go to the Mailscale dashboard.
- Click on “Campaigns,” then select the campaign you want to review.
- Open the “Reports” or “Analytics” tab for that campaign.
Key Metrics to Focus On
- Delivery Rate: If it’s below 98%, check for bounce or spam issues.
- Open Rate: Use as a rough sign your emails aren’t immediately hitting spam. But don’t optimize for opens alone.
- Click Rate: A real indicator of interest. If your click rate is under 1%, your content or subject line probably missed the mark.
- Unsubscribe Rate: Over 0.5%? You’re annoying people, or your list isn’t targeted.
- Spam Complaints: More than a handful is a red flag—stop and fix your list hygiene.
Ignore These (Mostly)
- Forward rates: Almost nobody forwards marketing emails.
- Social shares: Unless you’re running a viral campaign, this is just noise.
- Device breakdowns: Unless your audience truly skews mobile or desktop, don’t get lost here.
Pro tip: If you see a spike in bounces or complaints, pause future sends and clean your list.
4. Dig Deeper: Segment Your Results
Looking at overall results is fine, but the real insights come from breaking things down.
Segment by Audience
- By list: Did one segment perform better than others?
- By geography: Are certain regions more engaged?
- By previous engagement: Do your regular readers click more than new ones?
Segment by Message
- Links: Which links got the most clicks? (Hint: It’s rarely the one you expect.)
- Content sections: Did a new block, image, or offer move the needle?
Most of this is available in Mailscale’s reporting dashboard. If not, export the data and slice it up in a spreadsheet. It’s not fancy, but it works.
Pro tip: Don’t break things down into a million tiny segments. Look for big patterns—then test, don’t just theorize.
5. Track What Happens After the Click
Clicks are great, but conversions pay the bills. If you only look at what happens inside Mailscale, you’re missing the bigger picture.
- Set up conversion tracking: If you sell products or capture leads on your website, use Mailscale’s conversion pixel or integrate with your CRM.
- Check your UTMs: In Google Analytics or your preferred tool, filter by the UTM campaign name to see what traffic actually converted.
- Look for drop-offs: Are people clicking but not signing up or buying? The problem might be your landing page, not your email.
What to ignore: Don’t chase every micro-conversion (like “time on site” or “pages viewed”). Focus on the bigger actions: signups, purchases, downloads.
6. Compare Against Past Campaigns
A single campaign doesn’t tell you much. Trends over time do.
- Benchmark: Save your campaign results somewhere (spreadsheet, notes, whatever works). After 3-5 campaigns, you’ll start to see what “good” looks like for your list.
- Test one thing at a time: Change your subject line, call to action, or design—then compare the results. If you change everything at once, you’ll never know what worked.
- Don’t chase perfection: There will always be outliers. Look for consistent improvement, not magic bullets.
Pro tip: If you’re seeing wild swings in performance, check for outside factors (holidays, news events, technical issues).
7. Take Action—Then Repeat
All the tracking in the world won’t fix a boring email or a broken landing page. Once you spot what’s working (and what isn’t), actually use that info:
- Kill what’s not working: If nobody clicks a certain type of content, cut it.
- Double down on winners: If a call to action or offer works, use it more.
- Test, don’t guess: Send a follow-up campaign with one clear change, and see what happens.
Honest Take: What to Watch Out For
- Don’t trust open rates too much: Between Apple’s privacy changes and spam filters, opens are getting less reliable by the month.
- Ignore “engagement scores” unless you know how they’re calculated: Some tools love to bundle a bunch of stats into one “score.” Unless it’s clear what’s in it, don’t optimize for it.
- Don’t overcomplicate things: Fancy dashboards and endless segmentation can make you feel productive, but you’re better off writing better emails and testing real ideas.
Keep It Simple. Iterate.
You don’t need a PhD in data science to run better email campaigns. Set up tracking, focus on clicks and conversions, and make small improvements every time. If you’re not sure what a metric means, it probably doesn’t matter much. Keep your analysis simple, act on what you learn, and don’t get sucked into the hype.
Now get out there and send something worth tracking.