In this article
The Email Delivery Report in Forsta Studio provides insights into how survey invitation emails are sent, delivered, and engaged with. The report includes key data points such as delivery rates, open rates, and bounce rates.
The report is built using email delivery data returned by the underlying email sending solution. Depending on your environment, this may be:
SendGrid
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
To learn how to set up the email delivery report, see Setting Up an Email Delivery Report.
Note: The Open Rate Tracking metric is currently only available when using Amazon SES. If your environment uses SendGrid or other services, the Open Rate may not be reported.
Open Rate tracking is currently in Limited Availability which means that a request should be sent to support if you would like to have it enabled (on supported Amazon SES systems only).
To obtain open rate data it is necessary to enable the ‘Email tracking’ option under Email settings before starting to send emails.
Learn more about Open Rate tracking
The delivery data is captured in SmartHub and used as the data source for this report. A standard template is provided, but you can also build custom reports in Forsta Studio using the Hub data.
1: Report Sections
1.1: Summary Metrics
At the top of the report, you’ll find key aggregated statistics:
Total emails sent: The total number of email invitations attempted.
Delivered: The total number of emails successfully delivered to recipients’ inboxes.
Unsubscribed: The number of recipients who opted out from further communication.
Last email sent: The most recent date an email was sent in the dataset.
Soft bounce rate: Percentage of emails temporarily rejected (e.g., full inbox, server unavailable).
Hard bounce rate: Percentage of emails permanently rejected (e.g., invalid address).
Open rate: Percentage of delivered emails that were opened (available only on systems using Amazon SES currently).
Start rate: Percentage of recipients who started the survey after successfully receiving an invitation email.
1.2: Email Tasks Table
This table breaks down delivery metrics by email task (i.e., individual sending jobs).
Columns include:
Sent Date – Date the task was executed.
Task ID – Unique identifier for the email task.
Emails Sent – Number of emails attempted in that task.
Delivered – Number of emails successfully delivered.
Deliver Rate – Percentage delivered.
Bounced – Number of emails that bounced.
Bounce Rate – Percentage of emails bounced.
Opened – Number of emails opened (if tracked).
Open Rate – Percentage of delivered emails that were opened.
This table can be paged through or exported for further analysis.
1.3: Respondents Table
This section provides recipient-level detail:
Resp ID – Respondent identifier in the survey system.
Email – Recipient email address.
# Emails Sent – Number of invitations sent to this respondent.
# Emails Opened – Number of invitations opened (if tracked).
Interview Status – Survey completion status (e.g., Not Started, Completed).
View Details – Drill-down option for more granular delivery history.
This allows tracking at the individual recipient level to help identify delivery or engagement issues.
2: Customization
The provided report is a standard template.
Users can create custom reports in Forsta Studio by accessing the same Hub data source.
Customization options may include filtering by date ranges, specific surveys, or segmenting performance by task or respondent attributes.
3: Best Practices & Notes
Ensure you know which email provider (e.g. SendGrid or SES) is configured, as available metrics may differ. Please contact our Technical Support team if you are uncertain.
Use bounce rates to monitor email list quality and identify potential deliverability issues.
Monitor open and response rates (Amazon SES only) to evaluate engagement.
Export respondent-level data when investigating individual delivery or participation issues.