How to choose an email analytics tool
· 1 min read · The Bulk Mail team
Before comparing features, answer one question: are you measuring a campaign, or a conversation? Almost every bad tooling decision in this space comes from answering it wrong.
Three categories
Campaign analytics
Built into newsletter and marketing platforms. They aggregate across a send: delivery, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and comparisons between variants. Useful when the unit of work is a batch of thousands.
Deliverability analytics
A narrower category focused on whether your mail arrives at all — authentication, domain reputation, spam placement. If your open rate collapsed overnight, this is where the answer is, and no other category will find it.
Message-level tracking
Browser extensions that track individual emails you send by hand and report opens against a specific thread. The unit of work is one message to one person. This is what sales, recruiting, agency and freelance work actually run on.
What to check in any of them
- Does it change the email your recipient receives? Footers and rewritten links cost you credibility for a metric.
- How long is history kept, and can you export it? A metric you cannot revisit is a metric you cannot learn from.
- Can you delete the data? You are recording other people’s reading habits.
- Does the number appear where you work, or in a dashboard you have to remember to open? The second gets abandoned.
A tool you check daily and half-understand beats a tool you understand completely and open once a month.
Message-level tracking, inside Gmail. Free to try.
Add to Chrome — it's free