Here’s the fourth and final installment of the Legal & Best Practice Hub on Metrics and their meaning. What we’re hoping is to gain your feedback and comments.
This week we’re looking at External Monitoring and Strategic metrics:
External Monitoring
1. Authentication
Definition: A process that verifies an email sender’s identity.
2. Deliverability
Definition: Volumes of e-mails sent less the number of bounces received.
Things to take into consideration: Deliveribility is a big issue, it is also important to deal with the emails that aren’t deliver so you keep your list clean. It is important to note that this is a measure of which emails were accepted by the ISPs and NOT a measure of emails that reached the inbox.
3. Hard Bounce
Definition: Where the recipient does not see the e-mail due to invalid e-mail addresses, domain failure, ISP blocked etc.
Things to take into consideration: A high hard bounce rate often indicates poor data quality. Ensure that you remove all of the email addresses that hard bounced immediately and look at your data collection processes to ensure only good data is collected in the future.
4. Soft Bounce
Definition: Emails that suffer from a temporary delivery problem such as inbox full, server down, etc..
Things to take into consideration: A high soft bounce rate can often indicate problems with e-mail delivery where the ISP is not letting an email through becuase of temporary technical problems, becuase you have received high level of complaint rates or becuase you are sending messages to them too quickly.
5. Soft Bounce Rate
Definition: The number of soft bounces divided by the number of e-mails delivered (as a %).
6. Frequency
Definition: How often you are emailing each person in your database i.e. some recipients may have a frequency of once a week, whereas others are one every month.
Strategic
7. Lifetime Value of Purchases
Definition: The same as above but based on the first action within a short period of time from when the email was sent.
8. Lifetime Value of Visitors
Definition: Not every visitor purchases on their first visit. They may visit other sites, research the product or service then come back directly to the site. The offer may not be relevant at that time, so they might visit the site and interact at a later date. By being able to apply a wider lifetime visitor value, a more accurate value of the visitors can be ascertained. It is advisable to deduct the people who unsubscribe from this analysis.
9. Purchase Rate (average value)
Definition: This looks at the average value of the first purchase (compared to company average first order value).
Things to take into consideration: This is needed if the offer is driven by a reduced/loss leader offer to ensure that the campaign is not attracting people with a lower value. It should be used with monitoring of lifetime value to ensure the right target audience is being attracted.
10. Reach
Definition: Data users can calculate the reach of their e-mail marketing campaigns over time by calculating the number of unique openers or clickers over the period in question, e.g. 75% of the list opened at least one mailing in the last quarter.
Things to take into consideration: This metric gives a good indication of how your emails are performing across your database as a whole.
So that’s part 4. We look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Jonathan Burston
CACI & Legal and Best Practice Hub
Tags :
Our bloggers
Follow us
Recent photos
said on November 6th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
With regard to the definition of “deliverability,” marketers should be concerned about and know how many of their emails reached the inbox. As you noted, there is definitely a difference between the number of emails successfully delivered to an ISP and the number of those emails that reach consumers’ inboxes.
‘Accepted rate’ is unrepresentative of success and can mask larger issues such as whether your emails were eventually delivered to the bulk or junk folder vs. the inbox. Worse, many of these messages may not be delivered to any folder accessible to the customer – they simple fall into a blackhole where they aren’t delivered and aren’t bounced back to the system.
Marketers’ ultimate goal is to reach consumers’ inboxes. Whilst it may not be possible for all marketers, inbox placement data offers a far better metric of email deliverability success. If it is not possible to get inbox placement rates, marketers should definitely know how their in-house systems or external providers are defining deliverability. We see time and again that marketers who assume that the “delivered” metric seen on their reports means those messages went to the inbox are very much mistaken.
Richard Gibson
Chair, Benchmarking Hub, DMA Email Marketing Council and Channel Relationship Manager, (UK) Return Path.
said on November 10th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Richard, you make a great point. Working for a large direct marketing company, I see first-hand the importance of measuring reach rather than deliverability. As pointed out, deliverability is often a deceiving metric. As a marketer, I’m much more concerned with how my audience is interacting with my communications. If the value proposition is communicated clearly in my email messages, then we are less likely to have to worry about deliverability metrics.
Craig Aron
Manager, Digital and Emerging Media, Publishers Clearing House
said on December 29th, 2009 at 5:53 am
Yes it is a fantasy
You must be logged in to post a comment.