Read and share a campaign report
Open the Reports tab of a sent campaign, read the provider and domain breakdowns, and take the whole report away as a PDF you can hand to a board.
A sent campaign has two results tabs, and most people never find the second one. Campaign Stats answers "who did what": it lists every recipient and lets you search them. Reports answers a different question: how did this send do against your own normal, and where did it actually land.
That second question is the one you have to answer when somebody asks for the numbers in writing. This guide walks the Reports tab top to bottom, then shows you how to get the whole thing out of Mailsoftly as a PDF.
Open the Reports tab
Open a sent campaign and look at the tab row above the email. Campaign Details and Campaign Stats are always there. On a campaign that has actually gone out, a third tab appears next to them, labelled Reports.
The tab is only offered for a campaign that has finished sending. Drafts, scheduled campaigns and sends still in flight have nothing to report yet, so the tab stays hidden for them. The same is true of the individual child rows a resend, a gradual send or an A/B test creates: their numbers roll up into the parent campaign, and the parent is where the report lives.
If your account does not have email tracking switched on, the tab still opens, but the figures are dimmed and an Upgrade your account link sits over them. The two exports on this page are refused outright in that state rather than handing you a file of greyed-out numbers.
Open your sent campaigns in Mailsoftly
Read the campaign at a glance
The first card, Campaign at a glance, scores the send in eight figures. Two of them are counts: Sent, every email handed to the receiving mail servers, and Delivered, the part of that which was accepted. The other six are rates: Open rate, Click rate, Click to open, Bounce rate, Unsubscribe rate and Complaint rate. Every label carries a small question mark that spells out its own arithmetic, and hovering a big number tells you the counts underneath it, as in "1,234 opens of 5,678 delivered".
The line the Stats tab has no room for is the one under each rate: "Your account average", with a signed pill showing how far this campaign sits from it. That is the only honest answer to "is 24% good?", because it compares this send with your own history rather than with somebody else’s benchmark. The pill’s colour flips for the three metrics where lower is better, so a bounce rate below your average is green and pointing down.
Two things to know about those numbers before you quote them anywhere.
- Opens and clicks count people, not events. A recipient who opens your email six times counts once. The same goes for clicks: the click rate is the share of delivered emails that got at least one click, not the total number of clicks.
- Open rate and click rate divide by delivered, not by sent. Bounce rate divides by sent. That is why a campaign with real bounces has a slightly higher open rate here than a straight opens-over-sent calculation would give you.
The unsubscribe rate counts recipients of this campaign who are currently unsubscribed from your emails, whenever they opted out. Somebody who left your list last year and also received this send is included. Complaints work the other way: a spam complaint is attributed to the one campaign that triggered it, so it shows up on that send and nowhere else.
Read where the campaign actually landed
The Reports tab answers "where did it land" in two stacked sections, and they work the same way: a bar chart by default, a Table switch beside the heading for the numbers, and the same outlier rule marking the rows worth a second look. Whichever view you pick is remembered for next time.
Mailbox providers groups your recipients by the domain of their address into six buckets: Gmail, Outlook and Hotmail, Yahoo, Apple iCloud, Other personal inboxes, and Business domains. Country variants are handled, so an outlook.com.tr or a hotmail.co.uk address lands with the rest of Microsoft.
Read that section as a deliverability signal. If your open rate is fine overall but one bucket has collapsed while the others held steady, that is not a content problem. Your subject line did not stop working at one provider and nowhere else. It is a delivery problem at that provider, and it is the single clearest early warning you get. How much the section tells you depends on your list: a consumer list spreads across all six buckets, while a business-to-business list lands almost entirely in Business domains and pushes the real detail one section down.
These buckets tell you where an address lives, not which app the person reads it in. A company on Google Workspace is counted under its own domain in Business domains, not under Gmail, because nothing in the message tells us which client opened it. Mailsoftly says as much in the hover note beside the heading.
Top domains, directly below, lists the ten domains this campaign reached the most recipients at. On a business list those ten are usually ten companies, which makes this the closest thing the product has to an account-by-account view of a send. It is also where a Business domains bucket that read as one flat bar breaks back apart into names you recognise.
These are recipient domains. Your own sending domain does not appear on this page at all.
The columns are Domain, Recipients, Opens, Open rate, Clicks and Click rate. Mailsoftly marks the outliers for you in both sections: a row gets a small caret only when its open or click rate is at least five points away from what the whole campaign did, and only when the row has at least five recipients behind it, so a single enthusiastic reader at a tiny domain never gets flagged as news. A client whose whole office is ten points below everyone else is worth a phone call, or at least a look at whether their mail server is filtering you.
There is no bounce column on Top domains. Bounces are shown per provider in the section above, where a bounce rate above zero is marked in red on its own, because there the comparison is with none, not with the average.
When a provider or a domain does look wrong, take it to the deliverability page, where your domain authentication, your reputation signals and your bounce and complaint trends live. That is where a delivery-shaped problem gets diagnosed and fixed.
Watch how the engagement built up
The Engagement timeline plots cumulative opens and clicks as a share of what was delivered, hour by hour from the moment the campaign went out. It opens on the first 24 hours, where nearly all of the movement happens, with a 72h button for the long tail.
Because it is aligned on hours since the send rather than on wall clock time, it tells you something a total never will: how fast your list responds. If your curve is nearly flat by hour six, checking a campaign the next morning is enough. If it is still climbing at hour forty, judging a send on its first afternoon will make you wrong every time.
A campaign nobody has opened yet keeps the section but says so in words rather than drawing two flat lines.
The figures on this page are read live every time you open it. For the first 48 hours after a send you also get a Live badge and the overview tiles refresh in place while you watch. The breakdown tables and this chart update when you reload the page.
Take the report away
Everything above is one browser tab. Getting it to a board, a committee or a client means getting it out of the app, and there are two ways in the three dots menu beside Compare with other campaigns.
Download PDF gives you a self-contained A4 document. It is not a screenshot of this page: it is laid out for print and it differs in ways worth knowing before you send it.
- It adds the send date and prints whether the counting mode was all engagement or verified engagement, neither of which is on screen.
- It keeps all six rates with your account average beside each one, and a compact volume row of Sent, Delivered, Opened and Clicked.
- Mailbox providers and Top domains print as plain tables. The provider table adds an All recipients total row, and its share bars are drawn relative to your busiest bucket rather than to 100%, so a campaign that went almost entirely to one provider still shows a readable spread.
- The engagement timeline is not in the PDF. No chart is. If the shape of the curve is part of your story, screenshot it separately.
If the report says the opens came in low, the next move is usually a second send to the people who never opened the first one. Resend to people who did not open covers when that is worth doing and when it is not.
Email me this report renders the same PDF on the server and mails it to you, which is the better option on a big campaign where the render takes a moment. Mailsoftly confirms the address first, then tells you the report is on its way. The email arrives with the PDF attached and nothing else in it.
"Email me this report" means exactly that. It sends to your own account’s email address and to no other, and there is no field anywhere on this page to type somebody else’s. To get the report to a board member who has no Mailsoftly login, download the PDF and attach it to your own email. There is no share link, which also means there is no link to expire or revoke later: what you hand over is the file itself.
Before you forward that file, know what is in it. Beyond this campaign’s own numbers, the PDF carries your account average for all six rates across every campaign you have sent in that lane, including your account-wide bounce, unsubscribe and complaint rates, and it names up to ten of the domains you mailed. For a board packet that is usually fine. For anything that might end up public, it is worth a second look first.
With the report read and the PDF in hand, the last useful move is to put this campaign next to the others. The Compare with other campaigns button at the top of the page opens the comparison with this campaign already selected.
Ready to try it in your own account?
Free to start with your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account. No credit card required.
