When looking at your email statistics and reports in BenchmarkONE, you will see data for sent, opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints. Although they may seem straightforward, a better understanding of what email stats mean will help you analyze the reporting data.

Emails Sent: This is the number of emails that were sent out of BenchmarkONE's email server. This stat will automatically exclude any previous unsubscribes, invalid or bad email addresses (because we will not send emails to those contacts).

Opens: We use a tracking pixel to calculate opens. Anytime someone opens the email and downloads images OR simply clicks on a link, we count that as an open. If the email is forwarded and opened we will count it as an open as well.

Link Clicks: Depending on the report you are reviewing, this could be overall link clicks or unique clicks. Overall link clicks aggregate all clicks on the email, even if one person clicks 10 times. Unique clicks count how many people clicked-through.

Bounces: Hard and soft bounces count in this list and they are defined by the recipient's email server. If the recipient server does not accept an email, we count the email address as bounced. 

Soft Bounce: BenchmarkONE will try for 72 hours to try to deliver an email. If we still cannot deliver then it will be moved to a hard bounce (Ex: recipient’s inbox is full, our server can't connect with the recipient's server, etc).
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​Hard Bounce: This is a permanent failure. The email is not deliverable, so BenchmarkONE will stop trying to send (Ex: bad email address, the recipient's server is not going to accept emails from you, etc).

Unsubscribe: We aggregate unsubscribes when a recipient clicks the link in the footer of an email and submits the opt-out page, and anytime a recipient initiates an unsubscribe request from within their email client itself.

Complaints: These are people who have complained of spam either through the link in the email or their email client. We delete the email address from your database and prevent users from sending the contact any further emails.