Email delivery statistics are available from several places on the Dialog Insight platform.
However, you need to understand these statistics in order to be able to interpret them correctly.
First and foremost, you must know how email delivery works.
When you send a message to your contacts, our sending server’s task is to generate the message and to deliver it to each recipient’s server.
Once the message is sent, the recipient’s server has two choices upon receiving it:
- Accept and deliver the message
- Reject the message and return an error code
In scenario 1, the message is automatically considered as being delivered when the recipient’s server has accepted it. From this moment on, the email is no longer on our server and the “signal” is lost as it becomes the responsibility of the recipient’s server (Hotmail, Gmail, or other) to process it and deliver it to the recipient’s inbox.
However, the reality is that servers have spam filters and computers have antivirus protection and security configurations. It is therefore possible for the email to get blocked somewhere between the recipient’s server and the recipient’s inbox.
We will be able to retrieve data about the delivered email when the contact opens it and/or downloads images. At this point, we will be able to say that the email has been opened and gather data on clicks and other statistics related to the message.
In scenario 2, the recipient’s server returns an error code and, if applicable, the email is flagged as having encountered a delivery error and tagged with the corresponding error code and/or error message provided by the server. We have no control in this case and our role is to simply receive the error from the recipient’s server, add it to the statistics and register it in the contact’s profile.
Thus, when we look at the statistics of a message, we can see the delivery rate, delivery errors, the open rate, the click rate, etc. Email delivery is therefore the keystone on which email statisticss can be further analyzed.
For more details about message results, refer to the Results section of the online help, more specifically the article Overview of message results.