Reading your campaign funnel: where email actually drops off

Every campaign and sequence in rootmail now ships with its own engagement funnel: sent → delivered → opened → clicked. Four numbers, one story. The skill is knowing which gap you're looking at — because each stage drops for a different reason, and each has a different fix.

Sent → delivered: the infrastructure gap

This is the only gap that's about plumbing, not people. Mail goes missing here for three reasons:

• Bounces — the address doesn't exist (hard) or the mailbox is temporarily refusing (soft). rootmail suppresses hard bounces automatically so they can't hurt you twice.
• Authentication — SPF, DKIM, or DMARC failing at the receiver. Run the domain check under Deliverability; it grades each record and hands you the fix.
• Reputation — a provider quietly rate-limiting or rejecting you because of past bounces or complaints. Your 0–100 reputation score tracks this from real outcomes.

Healthy delivery is 98% or better. Below that, stop tuning subject lines — nothing downstream matters until this stage is fixed.

Delivered → opened: the attention gap

The message arrived; did anyone care? Opens are driven by three things you control: the subject line (honest and specific beats clever), the from-name (recognizable and constant), and timing (when your audience actually reads mail).

One honest caveat: opens are directional, not exact. Privacy features in modern mail clients pre-fetch images and can register opens the reader never made, so treat the open rate as a trend line — compare this campaign against your last five, not against an absolute truth. rootmail already filters the obvious proxy pre-fetch patterns, but no provider can make opens perfect.

Opened → clicked: the content gap

They read it; did it move them? Weak clicks with healthy opens means the inside didn't deliver what the subject promised. The fixes are editorial: one clear call to action instead of four, the link visible without scrolling, and copy that gets to the point. Watch click-to-open (clicks as a share of opens) — it isolates content quality from list quality better than the raw click rate does.

Sequences: find the leaky step

Sequences add a dimension campaigns don't have: time. The per-step breakdown on every sequence shows sent, delivered, opened, and clicked for each step, so you can see exactly where people stop engaging. A cliff at step three usually means the wait before it is too short (you're crowding them) or the content stopped earning its place. And because rootmail sequences exit automatically on reply, a "drop-off" can also be your success metric in disguise — people who answered step two never needed step three.

What good looks like

Ranges, not laws — audiences differ:

• Delivery: 98%+ (bounce under 2%)
• Complaints: under 0.1% — this one is a law
• Opens: 20–40% for a warm list, read as a trend
• Click-to-open: 10–20% for content that's working

Where to find it

Open any campaign from Messaging → Campaigns for its funnel and rates. Open any sequence for the funnel plus the per-step table. Workspace-wide numbers live under Insights → Analytics, and if you'd rather ask than look: the assistant answers "how did my last campaign do?" with the same data — and "why did this bounce?" with the actual audit evidence.

Four numbers, read in order: fix delivery first, then attention, then content. That's the whole discipline.