Deliver Insights is an analytics dashboard that benchmarks Deliver metrics from your database—like deliverability, spam reports, and unique clicks—across all other Slate databases.

To access Deliver Insights, select Deliver → Insights.

• Deliver Insights gives you four charts to compare your database’s transactional and marketing email communications against others.

• Scroll down and you’ll find month-by-month breakdowns of each metric for the past 18 months.

Deliverability

Try to keep deliverability—the percentage of your emails that reach their recipients at all—above 95%.

Keeping your deliverability high

Keep your messages out of the spam folder with our deliverability best practices:

• Email Address Deliverability and Validation

• Email Deliverability: Recommenders and School Officials

• Set up DKIM

Spam reports

We receive spam report data about the emails you send through Slate from email service providers. We show you the aggregate of this data in the Spam Reports tab.

Because spam report rates are often less than a thousandth of a percent, we include this precision in your reported rate—otherwise, it would likely read “0.00%”. Your goal, by comparison, should be to keep your spam report rate under 0.3%.

Avoiding spam reports

You can reduce your spam report rates by:

• Using message groups to let recipients opt out of mail that’s not relevant to them

• Sending messages to particularly unengaged recipients asking whether they want to keep receiving messages from you

• Using Google Postmaster tools to view your user-reported spam rates and keep your domain’s reputation sterling

📝 In February 2024, Google introduced additional requirements for bulk senders. Part of these requirements include staying under a spam rate threshold.

📖 Further reading: Gmail and Slate Messages

Unique opens

We include unique opens in your Insights report, but note that privacy features in most modern email services inflate this metric—often past the point of usefulness—with automated “opens.”  Elsewhere in Slate, we filter out these automatic, non-user “opens,” but the charts displayed here are raw figures; take them with a grain of salt.

The next tab, Unique Clicks, provides a more accurate measure of recipient engagement.

That said, your goal should be to maintain an open rate of 15% or more.

Why are my open rates over 100%?

You might see an open rate higher than 100%, usually near the beginning of the month. This happens because deliveries are counted separately from opens: if someone receives a message in January, but doesn’t open it until February, you’ll have the potential for more messages being opened than were sent in a given month.

📖 Further reading: Open and Click Tracking with Filtering Companies

Unique clicks

Unique clicks are the gold standard for measuring the engagement of your email communications. If your marketing emails are getting a click rate of 1% or more, you’re doing well.

Increasing your clickthrough rate

• Take advantage of Slate features like built-in A/B testing.

• Learn more about email open and click tracking.

• Optimize your emails for mobile responsiveness.