The Subscriber Performance report provides a clear view of how newly acquired subscribers interact with your email content over time. Instead of focusing only on total list size, this report helps you understand the quality of your audience by highlighting engagement, retention, and acquisition trends.
This report allows you to evaluate how subscribers behave after joining your list and identify which acquisition sources produce the most engaged and long lasting contacts. By analyzing both engagement activity and subscriber retention, marketers can better understand which channels and strategies contribute the most value to their audience growth.
The report focuses on contacts who subscribed during a selected time frame and analyzes how those contacts engage with your email campaigns. Users can organize the data in two ways.
You can group subscriber data by:
Subscription timeframe to analyze engagement for contacts who joined during a specific period
Acquisition source to see how subscribers from different signup methods perform, such as specific forms or entry points
When a timeframe is selected, the report displays engagement metrics for all contacts who subscribed during that window. This includes both overall engagement activity and a breakdown of how those contacts joined the list.
Several visual components work together to provide a comprehensive view of subscriber behavior and engagement.
At the top of the report, a series of metric bubbles displays raw totals for key engagement and delivery data. These metrics provide a quick overview of subscriber activity.
Metrics include:
New subscribers
Unsubscribes
Opens
Clickthroughs
Email campaigns sent
Emails delivered
Unique opens
Unique clicks
Each metric can be selected to open a drilldown report, allowing you to view the individual contacts associated with that metric.
This bar chart highlights where your new subscribers are coming from. It displays the number of contacts added from the top five acquisition sources, along with a combined category for all other sources.
This view helps identify which signup channels are driving the most subscriber growth.
The engagement funnel provides a visual summary of how newly acquired contacts interact with your emails. The funnel tracks three key stages:
Total subscribers
Subscribers who opened an email
Subscribers who clicked an email
This visualization makes it easy to see how subscriber engagement progresses from receiving emails to actively interacting with them.
This chart evaluates the long term performance of each acquisition channel. For every source, the report shows the number of contacts who joined from that source, the percentage of those who remain active, and the percentage who have unsubscribed.
This allows marketers to compare acquisition channels not only by volume, but also by subscriber quality and retention.
The Cohort Analysis section measures how subscriber engagement changes over time.
Contacts are grouped into cohorts based on the month they subscribed to your list. The chart then tracks the percentage of those subscribers who remain active during each of the first 12 months after joining.
In this context, a subscriber is considered active if they:
Perform at least one open or click during the month
Do not unsubscribe during that same month
This analysis helps you identify patterns such as how quickly engagement declines, which cohorts maintain long term activity, and whether newer acquisition strategies are producing more engaged subscribers.
The Cohort Analysis chart always measures the last 12 months of activity and is not affected by the timeframe or acquisition source filters selected at the top of the report.
A large number of new subscribers does not always translate into meaningful engagement. Use this report to evaluate whether acquisition channels are producing subscribers who actively open and click your emails.
Compare engagement and retention across different acquisition sources. If a source produces fewer subscribers but significantly higher engagement rates, it may be worth prioritizing in your marketing strategy.
The Cohort Analysis view is especially helpful for understanding how engagement evolves. If newer cohorts maintain activity longer than older ones, it may indicate improvements in targeting, onboarding campaigns, or content strategy.
When engagement numbers change significantly, use the drilldown reports within the metric bubbles to identify the specific contacts contributing to those metrics.
If your organization uses multiple signup forms, the report can help determine which forms bring in subscribers who actively engage with your campaigns.
After running a promotion or event that drives signups, you can analyze how those new subscribers interact with your content and whether they remain engaged over time.
By reviewing the Performance by Acquisition Source chart alongside Cohort Analysis, marketers can identify which sources produce subscribers who stay active longer and adjust their acquisition strategy accordingly.