Multi-channel Education Marketing Strategy & Demand Generation

Unpacking Email Response Rates: A Guide to Improving Campaign Results

Christine De Baca By Christine De Baca

While email marketing has become more challenging in recent years due to increasingly sophisticated SPAM filters, the addition of inbox filtering (like Gmail’s “Promotions” folder), and substantial increases in the number of emails landing in inboxes (as of April 2024 almost 10 billion emails were sent EACH DAY in the U.S.), email is still one of the most effective ways to engage with educators. When done right, email can generate leads, strengthen relationships with customers, and increase brand awareness.

However, to maximize your return on investment (ROI) from email campaigns, it’s essential to closely analyze email response, including open rates, click‑through rates (CTR), bounce rates, and A/B test results. This ongoing practice will help you fine‑tune your email marketing strategy and optimize the impact of future campaigns.

Below is a look at key email response metrics and tips for using these data to improve your email marketing efforts:

Open and Click Rates

Open and click through rates (CTR) are two of the most common and metrics in email marketing.

Open Rates indicate how many recipients opened your email, giving you insight into how well your subject line and preview text captured the attention of educators. A high open rate typically suggests that your subject line was effective at sparking interest.

Important Note: Due to increased privacy settings, open rates have become less reliable. For instance, Gmail and Apple Mail now automatically load images in emails, including tracking pixels, which can register as an “open” even if the recipient doesn’t actually engage with the content. As a result, open rates are often inflated. Because of this, marketers should place more emphasis on other metrics, such as CTR and conversions, for a more accurate picture of email performance.

Click-Through Rates show how many recipients clicked on links or calls to action (CTAs) in your email. A good CTR indicates that your email content was engaging enough to drive folks to take further action, whether it’s visiting your website, making a purchase, or downloading a piece of content. Since click rates are more directly tied to user action, they are generally seen as a more reliable indicator of engagement than open rates.

While open rates may not be entirely dependable, they can still offer valuable insights when paired with click-through rates. For example, a high open rate but low CTR suggests that your subject line grabbed attention, but the content or CTA didn’t inspire further action. In contrast, a strong open rate combined with a high CTR signals that your emails are well-targeted and your content resonates with your audience. Just remember that open rates should be interpreted with caution due to the potential for an inflated number of opens.

Hard vs Soft Bounces (and Why Bounces Don’t Tell the Whole Story of Deliverability)

Not all emails will successfully reach your recipients. Bounces occur when an email fails to be delivered. Understanding the difference between hard and soft bounces is key to troubleshooting delivery issues.

  • Hard bounces occur when an email is not delivered because the email address is invalid (e.g., due to a typo, a closed account, or an outdated address). It’s important to minimize hard bounces to avoid damaging your IP’s reputation—too many hard bounces could lead to your IP being blacklisted. Regular email list maintenance and hygiene can help reduce hard bounces and ensure your list remains clean.
  • Soft bounces, on the other hand, happen when an email is temporarily undeliverable (e.g., due to a full inbox or a server issue). While these emails may be successfully delivered on a subsequent attempt, recurring soft bounces could indicate an underlying issue that might require removal from your list after repeated failures.

Not every undelivered email will generate a bounce. Unfortunately, many districts’ email servers utilize strict spam filters and security protocols that can block delivery of emails to educators’ inboxes. In these cases, emails are counted as delivered because they do make it successfully to a district’s email server. However, the district’s security protocols may quarantine the emails and not actually send them on to educators’ inboxes.

To spot potential delivery problems, look at patterns in your open and click rates:

  • If no one from a particular school district opens or clicks your email, this may suggest that your emails are not being delivered within that district.
  • Conversely, an unusually high number of opens or clicks from the same district could indicate the presence of roboclicks or roboopens, where spam filters trigger email interactions without actual human engagement.
  • A sudden drop in opens or clicks, especially if you’ve had previous interactions with the domain, may mean your emails are being blocked or sent to spam folders.

By monitoring these patterns, you can pinpoint delivery issues and adjust your targeting and email list accordingly.

Conversions

What is considered a conversion will be specific to each campaign and often to your organization. Simply put, conversions are the action an educator takes after they click through an email. Conversions can include:

  • Signing up for a live webinar
  • Downloading a content piece
  • Watching a recorded product demo
  • Signing up for a consultation or demo with a sales rep
  • Purchasing a product

Depending on the features and functionality of your email deployment system, marketing automation system, and/or website analytics, you may track conversions based on form completes or cookies.

Conversions tend to be the most reliable metric of email success compared with open and click rates because conversion rates are less likely to be impacted by bots or other “false positives.” If you’re counting conversions based on form completes, make sure your forms are protected by Captcha or other security protocols to ensure that only real humans, not bots, can fill out and submit your forms.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is an important tool to optimize your email marketing results. This involves testing two versions of an email to see which one performs better.

You can test various elements such as subject lines, body copy, CTAs, email design, or even send times to determine what resonates best with your audience. For example, if you’re testing subject lines, send version A with one subject line to a portion of your list and version B with a different subject line to another portion. By analyzing the response to both versions, you can identify which messaging or tone works best for future campaigns.

It’s important to test only one element at a time to ensure you get clear data on what’s driving the difference in response. You can make incremental changes based on your A/B test results and improve your email marketing over time. By continuously refining your emails using these insights, you can steadily increase your response rates and ROI.

Analyzing Your Results

After gathering the key email metrics mentioned above, it’s time to analyze the results and draw actionable insights. Look for patterns in engagement: Are there certain subject lines, content types, or CTAs that consistently perform better? Which segments of your audience are engaging most with your emails?

Here are some tips for analyzing your email performance data:

  • Monitor open rates: Track how well your subject lines and content are resonating with your audience over time, keeping in mind that open rates can be inflated due to privacy changes on email platforms.
  • Analyze click rates and engagement by audience: High click rates usually indicate that your content is resonating with your audience. However, it’s important to look beyond the topline percentages and analyze how engagement fluctuates during key time periods with your different audience segments. This deeper analysis can help you determine if your email content aligns with critical moments in your audience’s decision-making process.

For example, you may find that district leaders open emails and download long-form content, like on-demand webinars and whitepapers, at higher rates in June and July when students and teachers are on summer break. Based on this data, you might modify your content strategy to send short-form content like infographics and short videos during the back-to-school season and the start of the second semester when district leaders are focused on students and teachers.

Crafting an email schedule for each of your key audiences based on their interests throughout the year can dramatically increase response rates. The more targeted and personalized you’re able to be with your messaging and offers, the more educators will respond.

  • Track response over time: It’s essential to track how engagement changes month-over-month and year-over-year. By doing so, you can identify trends and ensure your messages are timely and relevant, meeting the evolving needs of your audience.

For example, in the K–12 district sales cycle, engagement with “fact-finding” content (ex. Case studies, product FAQs, product demo webinars, solution-focused videos, etc.) may peak in January through March when school and district leaders are researching new solutions and planning their budgets for the upcoming school year. In contrast, teachers may engage more with instructional resources like lesson plans and how-to videos in late July through September when they’re preparing for the new school year.

  • Look for patterns: Identify trends in engagement and check for signs of email deliverability issues, such as unusually high or low open and click rates within a specific email domain. If no one from a domain ever opens or clicks an email, consider removing that domain from your list. Inactivity hurts your sender reputation and ability to get delivered to inboxes so it’s better to stop trying to get into “hostile domains.” A smaller list that consistently receives opens and clicks is more effective than a large list that generates low response.
  • Evaluate bounce rates: A high hard bounce rate can signal issues with your email list or deliverability. Regular list hygiene can help reduce hard bounces and protect your sender reputation.
  • Assess A/B testing results: Use A/B test data to understand which elements of your emails (subject lines, CTAs, design) generate the most engagement.
  • Check unsubscribe rates: A sudden increase in unsubscribes may signal that your content is not meeting your audience’s needs or that you may be sending too frequently. Be sure to analyze unsubscribes by job title. If the majority of unsubscribes are from one job title, then you can make an educated assumption that a particular topic, offer, or content piece didn’t hit the right note.
  • Track conversion rates: Measure how well your emails drive “beyond the click” actions like purchases, webinar sign-ups, demo inquiries, and content downloads. Conversions are the ultimate metric of success, demonstrating that your email message motivated educators to engage with your company.

Also be sure to track conversion rates by job titles and CTA to gain insight into what not only generates interest but action. In addition to guiding powerful refinements to your content and audience segmentation strategies, monitoring conversion rates allows you to connect email performance to key performance indicators (KPIs).

Summary

To get the best results from your email marketing, it’s essential to understand the metrics that impact your campaign performance. Open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, conversions, and A/B test results all provide critical data to help you fine-tune your messaging, design, and strategy. Regularly monitoring and optimizing your campaigns based on these data is key to increasing ROI and building stronger connections with your audience.

If you have questions about your email marketing results or strategy, sign up for a free 30-minute consultation with Spyre Marketing CEO, Emily Garner Sumner. You can spend your time with Emily getting feedback on a specific email campaign, your audience segmentation, your CTAs, and more!

About Christine

Christine has been with Spyre Marketing since 2016, helping K–12 and Higher Education companies enhance and execute their marketing strategies, launch effective campaigns, craft compelling narratives, and interpret marketing analytics. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her husband and kids, exploring the world, cooking and enjoying good food, hiking, and embracing adventure.