Calculating total reach in email marketing goes beyond tracking the size of your list. It’s about understanding how many people are truly engaging with your emails and taking the steps to improve that engagement. While some marketers stop at the number of subscribers, total reach requires factoring in other metrics like delivery rates, open rates, and click-through rates. These numbers paint a fuller picture of how far your campaigns are actually going.
Starting with Your Subscriber Count
The first step in calculating total reach is identifying how many people are subscribed to your email list. While this number serves as the foundation, it’s rarely the final answer. Subscribing doesn’t guarantee that someone is receiving, opening, or engaging with your emails.
Working with an online fitness program, I realized their email list was full of inactive subscribers. While they boasted 30,000 names, almost a third hadn’t opened an email in six months. Their subscriber count gave an inflated idea of their actual reach, which led to wasted time and resources.
This initial number, while important, is just the baseline. What happens after an email is sent reveals the true picture.
Factoring in Deliverability Rates
Not every email makes it into a subscriber’s inbox. Some are flagged as spam, bounce back, or fail to deliver for other reasons. Calculating your deliverability rate is critical to understanding the next layer of total reach.
A common formula for deliverability is:
Deliverability Rate = (Emails Delivered ÷ Emails Sent) × 100
If you send 10,000 emails and 9,600 are delivered, your deliverability rate is 96%. That means 96% of your subscriber base had the opportunity to see your email.
One retail client I worked with had a list of 20,000 subscribers but was plagued by an 85% deliverability rate due to outdated and invalid email addresses. Cleaning the list brought their deliverability rate up to 98%, ensuring more of their audience received their promotions.
Measuring Open Rates
Delivery isn’t enough to count someone as part of your total reach. An email that lands in an inbox but is ignored doesn’t truly contribute to your campaign’s effectiveness. Open rates are the next metric to track.
Open rates show how many recipients opened your email out of those who received it. The formula is straightforward:
Open Rate = (Emails Opened ÷ Emails Delivered) × 100
For example, if 9,600 emails were delivered and 2,400 were opened, your open rate is 25%. This means 25% of your original list size engaged with your email at the most basic level.
A SaaS company I worked with struggled with open rates below 15%. We discovered that their subject lines were overly formal and didn’t pique curiosity. After running A/B tests with more conversational subject lines, their open rates jumped to 28%, instantly expanding their total reach.
Adding Click-Through Rates
Click-through rates (CTR) take engagement one step further. Opening an email shows interest, but clicking a link signals that the content resonates enough for the recipient to take action. Total reach should account for those who clicked, as they represent the most engaged segment of your audience.
CTR is calculated as:
Click-Through Rate = (Unique Clicks ÷ Emails Delivered) × 100
If 300 people clicked on a link in your email out of 9,600 delivered, your CTR is 3.1%. While this percentage might seem small compared to your subscriber count, these clicks are often the most valuable metric, as they indicate genuine interest in your message or offer.
A nonprofit client I worked with ran donation campaigns that initially had a 1% CTR. By refining their email design with clearer call-to-action buttons and simplifying their messaging, they increased their CTR to 4%. This quadrupled the number of engaged recipients and boosted the success of their campaigns.
Segmenting Your List to Improve Total Reach
Total reach isn’t static. Segmentation plays a significant role in expanding it. Sending highly relevant emails to targeted segments of your audience can increase open and click rates, effectively boosting your reach.
One fashion retailer I consulted had a generic email strategy that resulted in a low average open rate of 18%. After segmenting their list based on purchase history, geographic location, and browsing behavior, their open rates soared to 35%. Each segment received tailored content that spoke directly to their interests, increasing engagement across the board.
Tracking Engagement Over Time
Looking at reach for a single campaign is useful, but tracking engagement trends over time provides a more accurate sense of how your email marketing efforts are performing. Metrics like average open rates, average CTR, and how these numbers fluctuate across campaigns reveal what’s working and where you’re losing traction.
A client in the education industry noticed a steady decline in engagement over six months. By reviewing their email frequency and content, they realized they were overwhelming their audience with too many promotions. Scaling back to fewer, more value-packed emails helped them recover their open rates and CTR, stabilizing their reach.
Monitoring Spam Complaints and Unsubscribes
Spam complaints and unsubscribes directly reduce your total reach. Every unsubscribe shrinks your audience, and spam complaints can harm your sender reputation, lowering deliverability. Keeping these numbers in check ensures your total reach doesn’t erode over time.
A personal finance blog I worked with faced a sharp spike in unsubscribes after an aggressive series of promotional emails. By incorporating more educational content into their campaigns and rebalancing their email cadence, they regained trust and reduced unsubscribes by 30%.
Putting It All Together
Calculating total reach means layering each metric—subscriber count, deliverability, open rates, and CTR—on top of one another. If you have 10,000 subscribers, a 96% deliverability rate, a 25% open rate, and a 3% CTR, your total reach might look like this:
Delivered Emails: 9,600
Opened Emails: 2,400
Engaged (Clicked) Emails: 288
While your initial list size might suggest a larger audience, your actual reach is smaller but more meaningful. These are the people who truly engage with your brand and are most likely to convert.
Why Total Reach Matters
Email marketing success depends on more than just sending messages. Understanding total reach shows how effective your campaigns are at connecting with real people. Optimizing for deliverability, engagement, and clicks ensures your efforts translate into tangible results. Measuring total reach isn’t just about numbers; it’s about understanding the audience you’re building and how well you’re serving them.
