Summary
When you send a marketing email (to a group of End Users), the associated data is recorded in a Sendout record
In the Sendout record you can view a wide range of information about the delivery (e.g. number of recipients) and performance analytics (e.g. click rate), and there are links to the actual emails in Planhat (Conversation records)
For an overview of statistics involving multiple Sendouts, you can use the Email Manager, create a Data Table Page, or create a Dashboard Page, etc.
This analysis enables deep insight into your email marketing campaigns, helping you to monitor effectiveness and make changes to improve your results
Who is this article for?
Planhat Users who are managing and reviewing marketing emails
Series
We have a series of articles on marketing emails and the Sendout model:
Analyzing marketing emails via the Sendout model ⬅️ You are here
Article contents
Introduction
"Marketing emails" are a specific type of email in Planhat, which you send to multiple recipients at once - typical use case examples are newsletters or announcements. Marketing emails include the ability for recipients to unsubscribe. For an overview of marketing emails, check out our introductory article here. (Note that marketing emails are completely separate from Workflows/Sequences.)
You'll want to keep track of what marketing emails you have sent and to whom - and analyze their performance. For example, what proportion of the recipients opened the email, clicked on a link, or unsubscribed? Insights such as these help you to ensure that your communications are optimized to have the greatest impact. In Planhat you can view all these data points and more, and easily compare the statistics for different email campaigns, so you can assess what worked well and what was less successful, and if you've implemented a new strategy or you're doing A/B testing you can evaluate the results.
Every time you send a Planhat marketing email to a group of End Users (End User being the Planhat model that corresponds to the people who are your customers, prospects or other contacts), the related data is saved in a Sendout record. The Sendout model is specially designed for marketing email data. There are a wide variety of ways you can view and analyze Sendout data in Planhat, which we will go through in this article.
"Sendout" - a Planhat data model
The main way that marketing email data is saved/displayed in Planhat is via the Sendout data model. The Sendout model is specifically designed for email marketing data.
📌 Important to note
Like other Planhat models, access to the Sendout model is controlled via data model permissions. You can read about marketing email permissions and settings more broadly in our separate article here.
You can view/edit the Sendout model in all the same ways as other standard Planhat business models:
In the "Data" Global Tool (also called the "Data Model" Global Tool)
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In the Data Explorer
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In Pages such as Data Tables and Grouped Lists built for this model
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In addition to this, there is a dedicated tab in the "Email Manager" Home feature specifically for Sendouts:
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Sendout records
So what exactly does a Sendout record represent? How are they created? And what data is included in a Sendout - e.g. what are the fields?
Each time you send a marketing email (to a group of recipients, who receive individual copies), this generates and populates a Sendout record. Here's an example of a Sendout record, corresponding to one marketing email, shown in a default Preview.
As shown in the screenshot example above, a Sendout record includes the email content, send information and key performance indicators to help you assess each campaign's effectiveness:
Delivery data
Number of recipients: the total number of recipients chosen as the audience of the marketing email
Sent: the number of emails that got sent out (so that's excluding unsubscribed and failed end users)
Failed End Users: the recipients for which the emails never got sent, due to e.g. Merge Tag errors
Bounced End Users: the recipients that never received the marketing email due to e.g. to a full inbox, or sender blocked
Unsubscribed End Users: the recipients who were selected but were not sent the email due to previously unsubscribing from marketing emails in general or the relevant category
Analytics data
Open rate: % of recipients who opened the email
Click rate: % who clicked any link in the email, excluding the footer links
Reply rate: % who replied to the email
Bounce rate: % of emails that failed to deliver (e.g. due to a full inbox, or sender blocked)
Unsubscribe rate: % of recipients who unsubscribed from marketing emails in general or this specific category
As you can see in the screenshot above, in a Sendout Preview you can also see a clickable list of the associated Conversation records, Conversation being another Planhat model. In this case, each Conversation is an email sent to a specific recipient (End User). So here you have, for example:
The Sendout record = I have sent out the June email newsletter to my UK customers
Associated Conversation records = the copy of the June email newsletter sent to the End User Bill Bailey, the copy of the June email newsletter sent to Aisling Bea, the copy of the June email newsletter sent to the End User Fatiha El-Ghorri, and so on
You can click on any of these Conversations on the Sendout record to open up the Conversation record (Preview) itself - for example:
As you can see from the example screenshot above, this also shows you whether this specific email (to this specific recipient / End User) was delivered or clicked.
🚀 Tip
As with Previews for other models, you can customize the layouts - check out our separate article about Previews for details.
Viewing and analyzing data from multiple Sendouts
In the previous section, we discussed looking at one single Sendout record, but what about when you want to analyze multiple Sendouts - representing multiple email marketing campaigns - at once?
Tabular data
Firstly, let's see how you can review the data in table form. As we showed above, there are number of places in Planhat where you can view this - in Pages, in Email Manager, and in Data Explorer.
Email Manager is a feature within Planhat where you can see an overview of emails within your Planhat tenant, including outgoing emails, unassigned emails, and your personal drafts, so it makes sense for your marketing emails / Sendouts to be here too. Here you can have a high-level overview of all of your marketing emails / Sendouts.
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In the "Sendouts" tab you can quickly see, at a glance, what's been sent out, by whom, to how many people, and what the open rates and click rates were.
For more specific and customizable analysis, we recommend that you create a Data Table (or Grouped List) Page for the Sendout model. There are several advantages of using Pages compared to just using Email Manager:
You can create a whole Section for some or all of your marketing emails (as shown in the Section for product newsletters in the screenshot below) - you can position your Sendout table right next to other relevant Pages, such as your audience list (a Data Table Page of End Users) and a Dashboard Page displaying Sendout charts (which we'll talk about next in this article)
You can apply filters - e.g. the screenshot below shows an example of a filter for "Marketing email category = Product Newsletter" having been applied
You can customize the table columns shown
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Graphical data
In addition to displaying Sendout data in a table form, you can of course display it in a graphical way, using a Dashboard Page and Planhat's wide range of chart (widget) types to analyze your data, enabling you to identify patterns, compare performance (e.g. in A/B testing), track trends over time (e.g. if you've been adjusting your marketing email strategy, are your open/click etc. rates improving?), and so on.
To give you some inspiration, here's an example of what this may look like:
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