This year was my first trip to the Email Evolution Conference in Miami Beach Florida. I know, you’re thinking how tough it must be to pick up and fly down there from Toronto, but you gotta do what you gotta do. While there I had the pleasure of interviewing several email marketing thought leaders. Today, I thought I’d share a few of my favourite videos from the event. You can catch all the interviews at http://www.GetResponse.TV.

Dela Quist
Dela is always provocative in his thinking on email marketing. If there’s one guy in this whole business who keeps the rest of us on our mental toes, it’s him. He’ll challenge any idea and plays the devil’s advocate so well; you swear you can see horns growing out of his head. In this interview he explains the logic behind what is known as the “Open Reach Metric.” This is a metric which, according to Dela, will fundamentally change how you do your email marketing.
http://getresponse.tv/watch/r3C4I-DmomM/

Jonathan Margulies
Jonathan Margulies is a Partner at Winterberry Group and he feels we don’t have the optimum terms to best illustrate what we do and what we want to do with online marketing. You know the term, multi-channel, but is it really accurate? Jonathan doesn’t think so! He believes that the term “omni-channel”   or if you prefer “omnichannel” marketing is more fitting. In this video he explains why using better terminology is critical to the marketing industry.
http://getresponse.tv/watch/iQUb-8MejG0/

Sundeep Kapur
Sundeep Kapur is a marketing thought leader and all around nice guy. What I love about Sundeep is his genuine enthusiasm for helping others understand email marketing and online marketing in general. At his EmailYogi.com blog, Sundeep dispenses wisdom and insight on a daily basis. In this video we talk about the top 3 challenges facing email marketers this year and what you need to do to meet them.
http://getresponse.tv/watch/hyW9Mcxhl-Y/

Stephanie Miller
Stephanie Miller, VP of Member Relations DMA, is simply an amazing person. She loves email marketing and is devoted to helping email marketers navigate the rapids of legislation and succeed. The Email Experience Council (part of the DMA) has a lot to offer you if you are an email marketer. In this video, Stephanie lays out what’s in it for you and why you should be involved with the EEC too.
http://getresponse.tv/watch/zOEaNdwjXqM/
 

Matt Blumberg
Matt Blumberg, CEO of ReturnPath and Chairman of the Board with the DMA and the perfect guy to ask what are the biggest challenge is in 2013 for email marketers. Funny I should say “biggest” because as it turns out, Matt wanted to talk about something you’ve likely been hearing a lot about lately, “big data.”
http://getresponse.tv/watch/H4CF_j_rNhM/

John Caldwell
John Caldwell runs Red Pill Email and is a go-to guy for people looking for sage advice on email marketing solutions. He’s also an uncompromising voice for email marketing best practices. I asked John about the three most important things one should consider when choosing and email service provider.
http://getresponse.tv/watch/QZ1C4kn0ySU/

Chris Baggot
Content marketing is a big buzz term in online marketing today, but what’s it all about? I was lucky enough to corner Chris Baggott of Compendium at EEC 13 to talk content marketing, demystify it and offer some tips on how to make it work for your business.
http://getresponse.tv/watch/6vLSrmQyIPY/

Ken Magill
Ken Magill is not known for pulling his punches. In my opinion, he’s email marketing’s answer to 60 minutes and the Colbert Report, all rolled into one. This is the first time I had the pleasure to meet Ken in person and I jumped at a chance to engage him on what Ken calls the “Conventional Wisdom Buzz.”
http://getresponse.tv/watch/94dJbOdFHvw/

Jim

Jim Ducharme
Community Director
GetResponse Email Marketing
www.GetResponse.com
@hugeheadca
 

It is important to build towards mutual results, so we need common, standardized metrics. In my earlier post called “Email marketing, are we even talking the same language” I talked about multidisciplinary teams and benchmarking, but what other reasons are there that make an initiative like SAME a necessity?

The need for a common statistics is nothing new.

To illustrate this and keep things light, some biblical references. Do you know the stroy of Babel? According to this history, and long before there was google translate, people used to talk the same language all over the world. It was great. While having this common language (but not yet insight, regrettably), they were able to build a tower that reached to the heavens. What to do to stop them?

The only way to stop them from doing amazing things WAS to rob them of their common language, therefore being divided because they couldn’t understand each other anymore.

The word Babel actually means “confused”, one of the first online translators was called babelfish. (and yes there was even an oscar winning movie with Brad Pitt in 2006 called Babel). There are some lessons to be learned here, one of which is that once you have a common language you are able to achieve more, without it can become a confused chaos.

Using multiple ESPs

Maybe we don’t realize but there are plenty of marketers who work with multiple e-mail, CRM, lead gen, CMS and other marketing automation systems at the same time. Singling out ESPs this might already be more than one. Sometimes 5, 6 or even more email marketing systems are used on agency side and multiple on client side. Can you imagine! We see what the problem is there.

A common language is needed in and metrics and reporting is the place to start with. But even if you aren’t using multiple ESPs at the same time, there are still needs for common language in regards to the long term. One of them being customer insights and migration.

Common language in ESP migration

One third of ESP clients migrate from one system to another per year. And how can we compare with the old metrics if we don’t have the same (standardized) reports. Although ESP migration doesn’t always have to be a big headache, it often is a hefty undertaking.

Migration is very hefty, especially when you are seriously sending email and it is not the kind of thing you wake up wanting to do. Only to see the deliverability part done in email service migration right takes 7 or more steps.

Behavioral data doesn't have to get lost

You don’t want to destroy or leave behind the behavioral data and aggregated insights you have been building over the last period, just because of incompatible statistics. This is where the use of standardized metrics comes into the picture again, making sure your reference reports from previous year(s) keep their value.

When it concerns using multiple marketing automation systems, either at the same time or sequentially, standards can make the marketers’ life all that easier.

By Jordie van Rijn, an independent email marketing consultant, specializing in smart email marketing, event-driven campaigns and is the founder of emailvendorselection.com a platform for selecting the best email tools.
 

In multidisciplinary teams confusion is very common, sometimes outspoken, often not noticed, but always limiting and slowing down the process. This is not a big shocker. Because people are from multiple disciplines, they have different backgrounds and a different frame of reference. When someone for instance is talking about a lead, it kind of matters if he is from sales, SEO email or a singer in the next pop-band.

How are we doing compared to others?

While interviewing some client side email marketers for my new book, one of my favorite questions was and still is: “How would you rate you current email program on a scale of 1 – 10..... And why?” I got different answers from a 5 to a 9. (no 10s yet) and almost all referenced benchmark data. “We are also above or the same as our industry email marketing benchmark.”

You see, although it might not be the best reference data, each marketer wants to know how he is doing both internally and compared to others. It’s also something the boss asks for, he also wants to know if there is more to be done and what the performance is. It’s one of the reasons I think that the dutch email marketing industry reports we did last year were so popular. Especially in travel, which is heavily dependent on online marketing. Finally something to really compare!

The challenge of making metrics count (equally)

Something that should be clear from the start are the metrics we use. The measurements of results success and failure. There are already a lot of ESPs listed as SAME project supporters but from the list of over 300 email service providers that is still not enough.

The challenge of understanding each other is multiplied if we keep speaking different languages. That is why all marketers using an email marketing solution should ask for the SAME (Support Adoption of Metrics for Email) metrics, especially if their email service provider doesn’t offer those metrics yet.

By Jordie van Rijn, an independent email marketing consultant, specializing in smart email marketing, event-driven campaigns and is the founder of emailvendorselection.com platform for ESP selection.

 

eMarketer’s recently published report, “Email Marketing Benchmarks: Key Data, Trends and Metrics,” concludes that email is still one of the most effective marketing tools, despite all the other channels now competing for the attention of consumers.

The report cites three trends:

1. The increasing use of mobile devices for checking email
2. The use of personalized and triggered emails
3. The use of “Big Data” for creating more targeted email marketing

Most interesting to me were the finding applicable to B2B marketers, particularly in regards to mobile and triggered emails.

In the past, those of us who write about email marketing separated out B2C and B2B issues because they differed. One would typically read an email marketing newsletter or post assuming it addressed B2C only unless stated otherwise. Any advice specific to B2B email marketing would be labeled as such. In our own email marketing blog, we strived to ensure we were offering enough B2B specific content.

These days, many of the challenges apply across the board. This makes sense because businesses are consumers too—real people, whether at home or at work. As consumers’ behaviors and expectations change, so do those of the buyers behind a business. If you’re a consumer who signed up to receive emails from Land’s End because you like their clothing, and you’re also a systems analyst responsible for recommending a new ERP platform for your company, your consumer experiences and preferences would naturally affect your expectations.

Look at the B2B adaption of social media for marketing purposes. If we were so good at keeping our personal/consumer and professional/work mindsets separate, businesses probably wouldn’t have ventured into the social media arena. However, people are people, and as our behaviors and expectations change in one part of our lives (the personal part), that can’t help but affect the other (the professional part).

Having said that, some aspects of B2B email marketing still require a different approach, as this report makes clear, especially in the case of mobile and automated email marketing.

What B2B marketers need to know about mobile email
Obviously, mobile usage continues to grow at a rapid pace. We can see evidence of this everyday both at work and at home, but research also proves it to be true. The eMarketer report states direct digital marketing solutions provider Knotice found in the last quarter of 2010, only 13.36% of communications were opened on mobile devices, but by the second half of 2011 that number had climbed to 27.39%. Now, according to this report, more than one third of emails are opened on a mobile device. According to a BlueHornet study, about two-thirds of US email users had used their mobile device to sort through email before reading it on the desktop.

However, there’s another caveat to this: an open doesn’t guarantee a click, whether it’s an open on a smartphone or a desktop. Although email open rates have gone up, click-through rates (CTRs) have gone down and now average below 5%, according to research from Epsilon and the Email Experience Council (EEC). This decline in open rates might be the result of the increasing the number of emails hitting inboxes. Mobile design has an effect on CTR, too. The BlueHornet study pointed out that 69.7% who received a non-optimized mobile email deleted it.

What B2B marketers need to know about automated email
Despite the overall decline in CTRs, one type of email continues to do well, generating noticeably higher than average click throughs: automated emails (also known as triggered emails). According to the eMarketer report, triggered emails generated a click-through rate of 10.4% (more than twice the average) in the first quarter of 2012. Some businesses have seen conversion rates as high as 50% with these automated messages.

That’s a very compelling argument for making automated emails part of your mix, especially as a B2B marketer today. Research cited in the report indicates the number of B2B emails will increase significantly. “Email research firm The Radicati Group estimates the total number of business emails sent and received daily worldwide will climb from 89 billion in 2012 to 143.8 billion in 2016.”

As a result, B2B marketers will see a lot more competition in the inbox. That’s on top of the competition from other channels—work-related and not. Keep in mind that just because someone is at work or at a desk, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still distracted by attention grabbers like Facebook and Pinterest. And that distraction can happen on any screen too, be it a desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone.

The best email marketing continues to evolve and change, whether we’re entrenched in B2C or B2B or both. Take note of the trends called out in reports such as this one. Be relevant and test religiously, whether your audience is at home or on the job.

Marco Marini, CEO
ClickMail Marketing

 

Five Ways to Improve Email Deliverability with Gmail

Email remains one of the most focused, effective ways to get your marketing message exactly where you want it to be: in the hands—well, inboxes—of your current and prospective customers.

Unfortunately, there’s also a dark side to this “clutch” marketing tool. In addition to legitimate email marketers, spammers send billions of messages to consumers every day, leading harried recipients with little to do in response but send everyone to “Report Spam” oblivion. 

So how do you avoid “guilt by association?” How do you ensure that your valuable messages make it past junk filters and reporting buttons?

If your recipients are using Gmail—and it’s likely many of them are, since it’s the email client of choice for more than 350 million users worldwide—here are some useful tips to improve Gmail deliverability. Although these strategies are smart for Gmail, they are good to keep in mind for other ISPs as well.

1. Ask your users to mark your messages as “not spam.” If your email happens to trip some junk filters and get put in your recipient’s spam folder, ask your readers to click on the “not spam” button to let Google know you’re an approved sender—not just for that user, but for other users, too. Google puts a premium on user input, and trusts their devoted Gmailers to tell them what they want to receive . . .and what they don’t!

Likewise, if you do get to their inbox but have your display images filtered, encourage readers to click on the “Always display images from this address” button. This lets Google know that you’re a valid sender, and enables your recipients to see your carefully constructed emails in all their HTML glory.

2. Ask your readers to add your sending “from” address to their Gmail contact list. This is a simple way to ensure all your emails get delivered, as it puts a big seal of approval on everything you send. If at some point you change your sending address, be sure to let your recipients know—they’ll have to add that address, too!

3. Keep a close eye on recipient behavior. Recipients who open your emails and click through your links are engaged users. Their behavior indicates they want to receive messages from you. Recipients who never open your messages (and miss your links entirely, as a result) could become an issue for you if they decide to report you as spam --even though they signed up to hear from you in the first place. 

ISPs, and we believe especially Gmail, use “engagement metrics” as a factor to determine if your recipients are interacting with your email (clicking and opening), just deleting it, unsubscribing, or reporting you as spam. If a subscriber hasn’t clicked or opened your email in the last 45-60 days, or 2+ publications, you should consider a reengagement strategy and ultimately remove unengaged users from your list. Monitoring your list and segmenting out unengaged subscribers will help your inbox placement across the board.

4. Make it easy—and as quick as possible—to unsubscribe from your emails: The easier you make it to leave your messages behind, the less trouble you’ll see from frustrated recipients. At first, it might seem like a good idea to bury your unsubscribe link somewhere easy to miss. But, if someone who doesn’t want email from you can get rid of you that way, they’ll simply report you as spam, which will subsequently affect your reputation and inbox placement for users who want to get your email.

This also goes for senders who don’t have an automated unsubscribe function, or who take too long to scrub unsubscribes from their lists. Your recipients aren’t going to be too happy when you pop up in their inbox after they took steps to banish you.

5. Monitor Domain Level Engagement Reports and Third Party Data: Even though Gmail doesn’t offer a feedback loop for complaints, you can assume that Gmail subscribers would behave about the same as the active portion of your other webmail customers (*not ALL those subscribers, but the active ones).  You should create a domain level email metrics report and monitor clicks, opens, bounces (by type), unsubscribes, opt-outs and spam complaints for your top sending domains. You can use this data to make judgments about engagement at Gmail, too and to determine if a specific campaign is causing higher complaints.

In addition, you should seed your lists using a product like Return Path to monitor inbox vs. bulk placement.

By putting these simple tips to work in your email marketing campaigns, you’ll increase your conversion possibilities in a big way by getting into the inbox and stay where you want to be, on the good side of one of the biggest email providers operating today.

 Colleen Petitt, Aprimo

The eec hosted a webinar this month highlighting the role of video in email.  Luke Glasner of Red Pill Email moderated and Justin Foster of LiveClicker and Rory Carlyle of Carlyle, Inc. contributed to the panel discussion.  The audience was engaged throughout as we learned about video email best practices, case studies, and technical requirements to achieve strong deliverability with video in email.  Download the webinar recording.

Top 10 takeaways from video email webinar:

1.  Video is a growing trend that email marketers need to pay attention to.  Video viewing time increased 26% year-over-year in the USA from August 2010 to August 2011.  180 million people, or 86% of the US Internet audience, viewed online video in August of 2011, according to comScore.  Marketers are taking notice, with video ad spend projected to increase 22% from 2011 to 2012 (eMarketer).  An August 2011 report by Forrester Research showed online video was perceived as the channel most poised to increase in effectiveness over the next three years by interactive marketers, behind only mobile marketing and created social media.

2.  Using video for video's sake is not a good enough reason to use video with email.  Marketers need to decide whether the application of video creates additional value for subscribers before deciding to employ this tactic.  Simply using video because it is "cool" is not a good enough reason; marketers need to first consider whether the storytelling power of video can be used to more effectively entertain, engage, or excite subscribers, build trust, stir the imagination, or persuade the subscriber to take an action vs. other techniques.

3.  Video is proven to be an effective tactic to boost email campaign performance, but only when best practices are applied.  Simply using the word "video" in the subject line of email has been demonstrated to help achieve increases in open rates of up to 20% vs. an identical message body without the word "video" in the subject line.  Video in email examples illustrated a 200% increase in CTR in a controlled A/B split in one example, 67% higher CTR v. average campaigns in another.  Still, if best practices are not used, video can annoy subscribers, distance marketers from subscribers, and even drive up negative metrics like unsubscribe rates.

4.  Video does not alter the fundamental rules of smart email email marketing. Relevance still rules.  Marketers need to think about who to engage with video; use of past clickthrough data, web analytics data, or customer demographic data are all possible sources of valuable targeting information.  Knowing which subscribers have watched video in the past can be especially helpful when developing segments for video email.

5.  Video production does not need to be difficult or expensive; marketers can make it so.  There are several techniques that can be used to minimize the amount of time required to generate videos for campaigns, such as: 1) use existing content developed in-house or by partners (just make sure you have permission) 2) If your brand is tolerant, carefully assess the production values you really need to accomplish the goal of the campaign.  It is possible to create HD video content in-house, with a full camera setup and set, for $4,000 - $5,000.  Hiring a professional or an agency is also an option, but many marketers make the mistake of thinking that video has to be expensive, when in reality video is only expensive when the marketer's production requirements make it so.

6.  Choosing which technique to use for leveraging video "in" email is a creative and cost decision.  Period.  There are benefits and drawbacks of each method of including video in email.  Concerns over deliverability, campaign send speed, or mail client support should not dictate the decision of "in" or "with" because technologies exist in the market to detect what email client a subscriber is using, and then automatically serve a compatible version of the video asset, animated .GIF video, or still image directly in the email based on what the mail client supports.  If a marketer has a creative aversion to using any of these creative treatments, it is easy to exclude the use of that treatment without having to cut the list.  Further, deliverability concerns can be alleviated simply by employing best practices in coding email messages.

7.  If using video in email, internal education is key.  Not all mail clients support full video in email, including Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010.  If you use one of these programs at your place of work, consider setting internal expectations so that stakeholders know what to expect.  While video in email support is not yet consistent across mail clients, as of June 2011 an "average" B2C marketer could expect to deliver "full" video in email to approximately 37% of the list, animated .GIF video to 50% of the list, and static image to 13% of the list.  Your results will vary based on your list's composition.

8.  Email marketers need to treat video as more than a "one off" experiment.  Since we belong to a metrics-focused industry, many email marketers choose to "one off" test video in email to see if it "works."  This is a terrible mistake because it does not allow the marketer to understand what about the video is driving results.  There are many different types of video content; some videos will work better than others.  Therefore, it is important when testing video to at minimum test over a series of campaigns (I recommend at least 3).  Only by looking at video in the context of several campaigns will marketers begin to discover what works and doesn't work for the brand.

9.  Know the lead times involved.  Most email marketers have not used video with email before.  If it's your first time, consider planning the video a full two months prior to the campaign launch.  Since video requires different techniques and tools to create and encode, try to give yourself a buffer and a Plan B far in advance.  If you already have access to video content, plan on adding an additional three to four hours per campaign for any testing or troubleshooting.

10.  Follow best practices.  Among them: 1) set the subscriber's expectation for video by calling the video out in the subject line (this is especially important for animated .GIF videos, which auto-play)  2) Use a "play" button in the video "player" to signal the subscriber can play the video.  3) Highlight in the email what "happens" when the video is clicked.  Because watching a video requires the subscriber to invest his scarce time, it is important to communicate the value you are promising up-front to prevent disappointment 4) Serve a "right click to play" message as the first frame of the video for Hotmail users (because player controls aren't supported yet in Hotmail) 5) Keep animated .GIF videos to 30 seconds or less.  Since animated .GIF videos don't support sound, they are most effective as "teaser" content.

BONUS TAKEAWAY:  Be clear with your campaign goals up front and do not over-hype or over-promise results.  Video email is still new and best practices are still emerging.  In my experience, the marketers that have gone on to be most successful with video email are those who took the time to learn about video in email, took the time to educate their managers and peers, and treated video email as an "experiment."  If you promise the moon, you'd at least better be able to jump off the ground.

Mobile email...it's more than just your emails delivered via a smartphone. To succeed as email marketers on the little screen (as opposed to the big screen), we have to change our mindset.

We have to have a Mobile Mentality.

That means everything we do in email we do while considering mobile at the same time. Everything, including:

- Subscription process
- From name
- Subject line
- Copywriting
- Offer
- Headline
- Banner
- Design
- Graphics
- Call to action
- Buttons
- Frequency
- Testing
- Design
- Rendering
- Links
- Landing page
- Metrics and benchmarks
- Reporting

In particular, pay attention to your From address, subject line and headlines. These are the items subscribers are going to initially react to when viewing emails on their mobile devices (and in that order), so it’s important the appropriate message is relayed in the space provided to achieve the most optimal results. An underlying message here, pardon the pun, is that the message must take priority over the design on a mobile device. You won’t have the screen space to wow with pretty pictures or glitzy graphics. When it’s mobile, you must wow with words.

Your From address must make sense. If you haven’t yet tackled the From conundrum, do it now. The From address is the first item people look at when deciding whether or not to open an email. Yours needs to be clear and compelling. Would someone rather open an email from donotreply@yourdomain.com? Or Frank@yourdomain.com? It matters on the PC, but it might matter more on the mobile.

Keep subject lines short-er. You’re used to writing short subject lines for your emails, right? Now you get to write even shorter ones so they’ll be attention grabbing on the small screen. If the first few words of your subject line are just the buildup to the last few words of your subject line, then the buildup might be all the subscriber sees on their iPhone or Droid. Make those few words count by making them words that hook, interest and compel the subscriber.

The headline is now the headliner. Graphics aren’t going to cut it on the mobile device if you’re relying on them to earn you a click through and conversion. Plus you’re dealing with an even shorter attention span. Your headline is doing even heavier lifting than before. In fact, it might be all they see if they decide to open your email! It absolutely must compel the reader to scroll down the email for more.

You're not limited by mobile, only required to think differently. Your email rendered on a smartphone or PDA is not an end in and of itself, only one step in the process you ultimately hope will lead to a conversion. Where does one go from an email? To a landing page...
 
Mobile-friendly emails need mobile-friendly landing pages. Otherwise, you might lose that hard-won click through. Some might wait until in front of a computer before clicking through, but if someone wants to take action while on the go, we want to make it easy for them by designing a landing page that works on a mobile device. With that in mind, here are a few tips for making landing pages as mobile friendly as your emails.

Design your landing page for mobile with the same mindset as your email design, with narrower widths and a single column.

Be brief when it comes to copy...and make that copy count. Consider using two landing pages, the first which is optimized for mobile and says the bare minimum and a second they can click through to if they need more information.

Make everything shorter: headlines, line lengths, chunks of text. As with the email, think bare minimum to get your point made and your prospect clicking.

Avoid using Flash. Replace it with HTML5 or JavaScript. For best results across devices, our design team recommends building landing pages optimized for mobile as straight HTML, CSS, and minor amounts of Java.

Design for fingers, not mice. Make links and buttons a size that is easy to read and easy to navigate with a finger. You don’t want someone getting frustrated when they are trying to click through and the button or link is too small! Also remember there’s you don’t get a hover state for a touch screen on a smart phone.

If you have a form, ask for as little as possible. Ask only for an email address if you can.

You must test the rendering of both your emails and your landing pages.  You can put countless hours into the From line, subject line, headline and design of that email so it will have maximum impact on a mobile device, but if you don’t test and check how it renders in real life on all kinds of devices, all your work could be for naught. Ditto for your landing page. Test, tweak, test again.

Also remember the growing use of iPads and other tablet PCs. Smaller than a laptop, bigger than a smartphone, it’s hard to know yet where these computing devices fit into the scheme of things, how people will use them, and the best way to market to people who use them.  Don’t overlook them, however.  Being prepared for these smaller devices is only one part of having a Mobile Mentality.


- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

When we first heard about the eec's S.A.M.E. project last year, our minds immediately flashed back to conversations with email marketers from years past regarding the confusion caused by email metrics. The idea that standardization might become a reality was something we welcomed with open arms.

This isn't a knock against those marketers mentioned above, either. With so many elements to consider each time a campaign is sent, email marketing is already challenging enough without the added complexity of "fuzzy" reporting metrics. We've talked to marketers who wondered how their click rates were holding steady even as "open rates" were decreasing. We've talked to marketers who didn't think a message could be considered "open" until it was viewed outside of the preview pane—after all, it's just supposed to be a preview. Then there were the people who asked about improving their "read rate" — a misleading synonym for the already-misleading "open rate" metric. Their confusion was understandable, and frustrating from our perspective because such an avoidable issue was causing headaches for the marketers that power our industry.

By committing to adopt the standards of the S.A.M.E. project, we forced ourselves to reevaluate the way metrics were presented to SubscriberMail users. Even though we offered a pop-up window explaining that an "Open" merely indicated that images had been rendered for a given message, the fact remained that we were still using the term "Open" on our reports to avoid causing confusion/uproar by changing such a familiar label. The S.A.M.E. project gave us the push we needed to take that risk, replacing "open" with the more accurate label of "render."

Along the same lines, we had long discussed the idea of combining the number of recipients who rendered images with the number of recipients who did not render images but did click a link(s) in a given message. In our discussions with email marketers, we always came back to the issue of image blocking and how open (render) rates did not necessarily indicate how many recipients engaged with their messages. Implementing the eec's "Unique Confirmed Open" metric improved our reports by including this more accurate representation of overall engagement.

Once the S.A.M.E.-related updates were in place and approved by the eec, we were faced with the difficult prospect of rolling out changes to the reporting metrics on which our clients so heavily depended. As email marketers ourselves, we took this very seriously—our system users depend on the metrics provided by SubscriberMail to show the success of their marketing efforts, and we did not want anyone to think those historical metrics had been eliminated or skewed in any way. Through email alerts and phone conversations, we explained to clients why they would soon see changes to their reporting metrics, and what those changes meant. We explained that largely the same data was being presented in our reports, but it was being presented through labels that more accurately reflected the nature of the data collected. And, in some cases, new metrics were available to make our reports even more valuable.

Of course, we fielded a few phone calls post-release, but to our surprise even those inquiries were born more out of curiosity than any kind of panic. In the end, our clients proved that they were ready to embrace clarity over convention when it came to their email reporting metrics. When every email service provider does the same, we'll have done our job of moving the email marketing industry forward with a more knowledgable and better-equipped user base than ever before—and we can finally retire the "open rate" debate once and for all.

— Dave McCue
Marketing Manager
SubscriberMail
@DaveMcCue

When I read this article promoting the death of Forward to a Friend (FTAF) written by Ed Henrich over on ClickZ, I admit I was disappointed. While the stats say Share With Your Network (SWYN) usage is steadily increasing and FTAF usage is steadily decreasing, I have to ask everyone to take a step back and ask "Why?".

Let's get real for a minute: today, neither SWYN nor FTAF produce gang-buster numbers for your email marketing campaigns. The reality is that very few of your subscribers will choose to share your content to their friends, family or network.  But when they do -- oh, when they do! -- my belief is that you'll want them to do it through an email forward versus social sharing.

Because it's my belief that emails that are forwarded to friends, whether through the FTAF mechanism or not, have more traction and a higher conversion rate over SWYN all day, every day.

Hear me out:

The metric that we can actually report on -- those that click the forward link, fill in their friends' email addresses and hit submit -- vastly under-reports the true number of forwards. I don't know about you, but when I want to share an exciting deal from LivingSocial or sale at Old Navy, 99 times out of 100 I use my email client to forward versus the FTAF link.

The same could be said about SWYN, so I'll move on to my next point: views. Ask yourself this question: "If you were to receive an email forwarded from a colleague or friend, how likely are you to open it and check it out?"  Most probably, your response is "very likely."  How likely are you to, first, see a tweet/Facebook post/Digg/Tumblr post... that a friend posts and then click the link to read more? I would imagine the likelihood here is much smaller.

The stats for social sharing and views are highly debated with only anecdotal numbers to date, but the latest study reports that it produces an 1% lift in views and a 24.3% increase in reach when shared on social networks.  Please note that views and opens do not equate to sales, which I imagine is an exponentially smaller number.

So let's get to the bottom line: people aren't just going to magically share your emails; you have to ask them to take action and give them clear reasons to do so.  I encourage clients to include a FTAF link due to, to borrow a Dela Quist term, "the nudge effect" of including a request in the email. If you don't ask, it's not likely to happen.

Having folks share your content is a big win regardless of the medium, but in my opinion FTAF wins in the epic battle of FTAF vs. SWYN (if there should even be one or the other) every time.

For or against FTAF or SWYN? Weigh in with your opinion in the comments section.

- Kelly Lorenz
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto
@KNLorenz

 

The email marketing industry needs standard reporting and metrics.

Today it is impossible to compare and benchmark response and deliverability rates across the industry because marketers get reports with different terms based on different calculations. Marketers are restricted in comparing reports and synchronizing data when looking to evaluate or change email broadcast vendors.

Inaccurate or inconsistent metrics diffuse the credibility of email marketers.  If our own metrics cannot conform to benchmarks, we lessen our ability to convince senior management and fellow digital marketers of our success.  It also hinders our ability to negotiate for resources.

You can help.  Read the quick background here and then take action with the links below.

The email marketing industry may be ignobly unique among direct and online marketing disciplines for our lack of measurement standardization.  For the past two years, the members of the eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable (a volunteer member committee)  have wrestled with the problem of a lack of a consistent and unified standards for the most basic email metrics such as delivered, open and click.

 
Through our work, the Roundtable has built a foundation for industry standardization for these basic but important metrics.

We have created (and vetted) new definitions of key measures so that they are not only accurate, but the names accurately reflect the measure.  (You can read in past eec blog postings about the struggles and debates to come up with terms we could all support.)  Latest definitions are here.

We have surveyed dozens of email broadcast vendors (ESP's and MTA/on-premise providers) in order to audit existing reporting and gauge the level of variance across the industry.  Please note that the eec Roundtable does not support or claim that any one provider's method of calculating common metrics is better than any other.  Many ESP's and other broadcast vendors participated in the development of these definitions.  We are very grateful for their support.

The Roundtable has repeatedly come to the industry – practitioners, eec members and thought leaders – to gather feedback and insights.

Now it's time for action.


Here's how you can help us start the ball rolling.  Join our launch efforts now.

Voice your support (or dissent) for standardization of metrics in our industry.  Take this one question survey.

Read the definitions

Tell us your thoughts and send in any corrections to the Roundtable.

Commit.  Sign the petition to advance standard metrics now.

Join the Roundtable (eec members only).  Just email Ali at the eec.

Please place your comments below.  And stay tuned!

Thanks to the hard working members of the eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable! 

- John Caldwell & Luke Glasner, eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable Co-Chairs

 

 

I’m a lover of magic.  When illusions appear creative, bold, and clever, they seem worthy of being shared with everyone.  On the other hand, if it’s a trick that everyone knows, the “magic” becomes cheap and hollow, unlikely to fool anyone. When it comes to the standardization of email metrics, the question arises: is this truly noteworthy, or simply another case of “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?”  Smoke and mirrors won’t work in this case; complete transparency is necessary to address this issue.  It’s time to put all of our cards on the table and examine various aspects of the argument surrounding standardization.

As co-chairs of the eec's Measurement Accuracy Roundtable, independent email consultants John Caldwell and Luke Glasner have marshaled a group of industry players to launch an email standardization project.  For what it’s worth, that project is gaining momentum and earning some serious ink within the industry.  This is not the same old dog and pony show we’ve seen in the past; these guys really have their act together.  Think of them as Siegfried and Roy of the email industry.  Their S.A.M.E. project (Support Adoption of Metrics for Email) has bent the ears of industry pundits, and their formula for encouraging ESPs to adopt the standards seems to be fooling everyone.  And in this context, deception is a good thing. Learn more about the S.A.M.E. project here. 

Sleeveless in Seattle
As with any new industry-related project, many challenges surface, but without early adopters, we’d be left sleeveless, a nightmare for any magician.  Two ESPs, MassTransmit/EmailTransmit and AllWebMail have already committed to adopting the industry standard for metrics which was released by the DMA/eec in March 2010.  Since then, a dozen other high profile ESPs have committed to adopting the standards within the next six months.  When you think about early adopters, companies like these help pave the road for the rest of the industry.  As interested ESPs begin to track the progress and milestones achieved by the S.A.M.E. project, momentum will build and the benefits will begin to blossom around the industry.

“Adoption is not just a semantics game,” says Stephanie Miller, Vice Chair of the eec and an active member of the Roundtable (her day job is at inbox deliverability solution provider, Return Path).  “Marketers usually find out that there are no standards when they go to benchmark their performance, or when they change vendors and realize that all those numbers they’ve been betting their bonus on – they don’t mean what they thought they meant!

“It’s about time our industry stepped up and supported standard metrics just like any other direct marketing discipline,” she says.

Deliverability Will No Longer be a Selling Point for ESPs
Once the implementation of email standards leads to congruency across the industry, ESPs and marketers will find themselves on a level playing field.  This means marketers may spend more time searching for the right ESP, but once a match is made, marketers will be less likely to move from one ESP to another due to inconsistency in metrics.  This means attrition rates for switching ESPs will fall, and in turn, ESPs will focus on services that will keep customers longer and help them achieve a higher ROI. Examples of such services include compelling creative copy and perhaps even a SWOT analysis every month/quarter provided by the ESP to each marketer.  Higher performance of the channel benefits all of us.

S.A.M.E. Project Goals
Once a magician takes his oath, he must never reveal his secrets.  However, if aspiring participants are willing to learn magic, they, too, can join the “magic club.”  ESPs face a similar choice.  They can remain on the outside looking in, simply observing the progression of the S.A.M.E. project, or they can choose to be an active part of the club.  John and Luke's first goal is 10-15% of the ESP market adopt the standards.

Nowadays, when an ESP reports on the “state of the industry,” they analyze metrics only of their own campaigns, like a magician who looks in the mirror and declares himself successful.  Industry standardization will introduce accountability to the industry, providing the digital marketing community with sterilized benchmarking and consistent reporting.  The spotlight now shines bright on John and Luke and the eec Roundtable, along with other industry veterans and aspiring ESPs involved with the S.A.M.E. project. It is their mission to deliver what the email industry yearns for: a final levitation act that will wow the crowd and inspire mass adoption.  They hope to prove that they are master magicians—if they perform their act well enough, even the skeptics will believe. 

Get Involved

Marketers:  Send this article to your ESP and encourage them to adopt the standards.
ESPs:  Study the new standard definitions and set a goal for yourself to adopt them.  Be part of the program.

Now, where did all the Rabbits go?


- Fred Tabsharani
Port25 Solutions, Inc.
@tabsharani

I’ve had the pleasure of serving on the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable of the Email Experience Council (eec) for the last few months. One of the goals of the Roundtable is to promote a new set of email marketing measurement standards called the Support Adoption of Metrics for Email (SAME). The new standards are a dramatic improvement over original metric definitions. They provide more insight into the true results of a campaign and paint a more accurate picture of your campaign performance.

It’s important that all Email Service Providers (ESPs) adopt these new standards so that we have a common set of definitions industry-wide. Right now its not possible to compare campaign results from one system to another as they don’t follow the same calculations in their metrics. And forget aggregating any industry-wide metrics, even something as simple as an open rate, because that metric is calculated differently by various ESPs.

Earlier this week the Roundtable announced that Email Transmit was one of the first two ESPs to adopt the new metrics standards. Read the press release and the DMNews article, "Inbox Insider: E-mail measurement should be standardized". They also mentioned 11 more ESPs have committed to doing so in the next six months.

We’re clearly at the beginning of a significant improvement in our industry. With the work of the Roundtable members we hope to get other ESPs to adopt the new standards and for other email platforms to use the metrics in their reporting definitions too.

If you’re interested in supporting the S.A.M.E. Project, start by signing the petition, then read the definitions. Make sure your ESP or email delivery platform has plans to implement the new metrics into their system. Hopefully in the near future we’ll all be able to abide by a common set of metrics and have usable industry-wide benchmarks based on the same definitions.

- Adam Holden-Bache
Email Transmit

I'm new here, but I've been around a long time. I've seen the confusion and frustration that non-uniform report metrics can cause, both for marketers and for agencies and vendors providing email services and technology.

Email marketers are almost universally judged based on program performance. For them, every click, open, delivered, bounced and sent matters. So when there are multiple email systems in play or marketers are considering a new email solution from a different vendor, there are always headaches around what the report metrics are and why they don't match.

The marketer gets mad because things are different and there's no way to compare apples to apples. The vendor gets mad because some performance metric in their system is not coming out as well as some other vendor's, so they look bad. The marketer's boss gets mad because the numbers don't match up between systems, so they lose confidence in ALL of the metrics.

It's all-around bad for everyone.

I volunteered for the eec's Measurement Accuracy Roundtable because I believe that accurate and consistent reporting is key to improving not only email marketing programs, but all marketing programs. Metrics that marketers have faith in and trust provide the data they need to do more advanced targeting and segmentation, which creates a unique and more engaging experience for recipients.

Isn't that what email marketing has promised all along?

Accurate and consistent metrics give marketers the confidence to add bold elements to their programs because they can count on the data on which they make their decisions. Reporting data that is consistent across programs and providers lets businesses make informed decisions about which solutions best serve their needs, not just which one has the most forgiving formulas in their reports.

But now I put on my vendor hat and say, "Why should I do this? It's not a competitive differentiator. I haven't seen this on any RFP. What's in it for me?"

On the surface, nothing, but underneath, it says a lot about what's important: the email marketer. Your customers. Your users. Your industry.

Sure, as a vendor, there are a ton of new features, enhancements, and fixes that need to be added to the application, but this one is not just about your current users or prospects. It's about the email community. It's about making A = A. It's about fixing something that is broken with our industry.

What will you do for your industry? Will you join us in helping fix a long-time issue that affects all email marketers? Together, we can do it!

- Ivan Chalif
Director of Email Product Marketing
Alterian

Read Fred Tabsharami's post on the SAME project.

Read more about standard email metrics.

 For the past few years, the eec's Measurement Accuracy Roundtable has been conscientiously working to standardize email metrics. Standardizing these metrics is crucial to improving the quality of reporting and to enhance the creditability of the email industry. As part of the standardization goal, the Roundtable seeks congruent email reporting across existing Email Service Providers.

 
Research done by the eec's Measurement Accuracy Roundtable shows that ESPs use several different methods of measurement for the Click-Through Rate (CTR) metric.  During our discussions we identified several methodologies for calculating the CTR.  Two methods, delivered-based and open-based, emerged as the most common based on an online poll conducted by the Roundtable.  Here are the poll results:



The majority of respondents calculated the CTR using clicks divided by delivered, similar to how direct mail calculates its response rates.  Clicks divided by open was the second most common method and is similar to other online advertising methods that are impression-based such as banner ads and search sponsor links.  Companies often use more than one tool and therefore choose the methodology that makes the most sense for their media mix.  Having to normalize their data may create additional work for IT or marketing departments when they want to report and analyze results of their email program overall or roll up information into higher level reporting and analytics dashboards.

What can email marketers in the field take away from this survey?

• First, it reminds us to check with our ESP to determine how they calculate metrics in their reporting to help maintain comparability and consistency while comparing results across or within email campaigns.
• Second, we should also check how metrics are being calculated in other systems that email impacts, such as web analytics, to determine any necessary adjustments to normalize our reporting for cross-media analysis.  
• Third, it demonstrates the need for email marketers and ESPs to come together to standardize metrics.

For the past two years, the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable has been working to standardize email metrics to improve the quality of reporting for the email industry and provide more uniformity in reporting for email marketers and email service providers alike.  You can learn more on this blog or show your support for the program on the Roundtable's online petition.

Special thanks to Peter Roebuck of AllWebEmail for contributing to this post and to all the Roundtable members for their participation.

Luke Glasner
Co-Chair
eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable

 

 

 

 

If you're still managing your own email marketing campaigns without any outsourced expertise, you might want to take a look at the benefits of outsourcing. Here are just a few of the many benefits of outsourcing for better managed email marketing:

• Increase your deliverability rate
• Improve your email design and email rendering
• Gain a deeper and more actionable understanding of your reporting and metrics · Protect your online sending reputation with expert advice
• Have more staff time for other initiatives
• Add the highest caliber email marketing expertise to your team without increasing your payroll
• Draw on more and broader email marketing experience with seasoned professionals guiding you
• Spend more time on strategy and planning, less on implementation
• Enjoy a solution that automatically scales with your growth
• Know you're working with the best email service provider for your business
• And ultimately, improve your email marketing ROI!

If you want to learn about better managed email marketing via outsourcing, reach out to ClickMail Marketing for more information.

 

Gmail reported in their blog this week that they have developed a way to provide their users with an opportunity to report spam and/or unsubscribe from emails they receive in their Gmail accounts. The article, titled "Unsubscribing Made Easy" is a positive change for Gmail, but still falls short of where most legitimate senders want to see.

Like many complaint feedback loops (also known as FBL's) offered by a number of ISPs, Gmail's new functionality is mostly a good thing. I applaud their effort, and it certainly helps when there is this cooperation and transparency in the sender/receiver relationship. It is better for everyone. This is why the Abuse Reporting Format was met with applause by senders when it arrived a few years back.

Here are the good parts. First, Gmail's new feature provides the subscriber with a chance to mark a message as spam, which should allow Gmail to better filter their email. Second, in addition to the option to just report spam, the end user may also choose to "unsubscribe and report spam." This second option apparently is just provided when Gmail deems the sender to be reputable. See the image below for an idea on what the subscriber sees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In his blog, Brad Taylor outlines the reasons Gmail pursued the development of this new feature.

"For those of you senders who are interested in this feature, the most basic requirements are including a standard "List-Unsubscribe" header in your email with a "mailto" URL and, of course, honoring requests from users wishing to unsubscribe. You'll also need to follow good sending practices, which in a nutshell means not sending unwanted email (see our bulk sending guidelines for more information).

With an easy way to unsubscribe, everybody wins. Your spam folder is smaller, and senders don't waste time sending you email that you no longer want.

Update (1:50pm): If you want to unsubscribe without reporting the message as spam, click "show details" in the top-right corner of the message, then click "Unsubscribe from this sender."

It is this piece that leads me to a bit of concern on the implementation. If Gmail is doing their usual checks on authentication, reputation, content etc. to determine which senders are legitimate, why then force the end-user to either mark something as spam, or go through "show details" (which nearly no one will do) to unsubscribe? Why not also provide an unsubscribe button on the interface in addition to the "report spam" button?
I can understand why Gmail would forgo providing the email address back to the sender at the user's discretion. However, even the FTC has a study showing that unsubscribing from spam doesn't really lead to more spam. In the FTC's 2002 study, they report that "In no instance did we find that any of our unique email accounts received more spam after attempting to unsubscribe."

Gmail has the opportunity to educate their subscribers on legitimate and unsolicited email. Why not provide just an "unsubscribe" button for legitimate senders, and explain why they are doing it, rather than propagating the unfounded fear of unsubscribing?
Also, other ISPs have gotten around this privacy concern by not passing back the actual email address back to the sender. Many senders use other forensics to determine which subscriber complained so that this subscriber can be removed from the list.

Engagement Matters
We advise clients to look at all sorts of engagement metrics, and unsubscribes and complaints are equally as important as opens and clicks. When possible, I'd like to know the ultimate intent of the subscriber when they choose to get off of a list. I always say I'd rather have someone unsubscribe from my email than ignore me.

As for which email this is enabled for and which not, the folks over at Word to the Wise looked at this a bit deeper and do some testing. They found that:
"Conditions where the unsubscribe option is presented include:

• The mail is authenticated
• The sender has a good reputation
• The email has a mailto: option in the List-Unsubscribe header
• The recipients marks the message as spam"
  

Read more about their tests here http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/the-exacttarget-blog/0/0/gmail-offering-unsubscribe-option or here http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2009/07/gmail-offering-unsubscribe-option/.

Either way, legitimate senders do benefit from this, but it is fun to dream of having both unsubscribe and report spam options available to subscribers.

 

- Chip House, Vice President, Industry & Relationship Marketing, ExactTarget

Chip is responsible for industry research and relations, and owns the targeted marketing programs that ensure the satisfaction and success of ExactTarget's client base.  Chip also manages the teams responsible for marketing research, deliverability compliance, and privacy initiatives.  As an established industry leader, Chip writes regularly for online marketing publications and was named to BtoB Magazine's 2005 "Who's Who in B-To-B" for being a vocal proponent of legitimate commercial email. Chip brings 20 years of direct marketing and twelve years of internet marketing experience to ExactTarget.

I've been hearing a lot of questions surrounding the best application of social media to the marketing mix, but one that has been slightly overlooked and under-discussed is who should really own it within an organization. And until you can figure that out, it is really difficult to hold any one internal resource responsible for devising a solid and actionable social plan.

To that end, StrongMail Systems recently conducted a survey to see how marketers were approaching the social space and who planned to own the channel. More than 500 marketers responded, and the results validated our suspicions. Social media is emerging as a direct marketing channel, and marketers are planning significant investment in email marketing and social media programs in the second half of 2009.

One thing the survey clearly conveyed is that ownership of social media within the various facets of marketing is still up for grabs, with 29% of respondents stating that responsibility is owned by multiple departments. But for 36% of the respondents, social is owned by the direct marketing organization, which allows for significant alignment with email marketing efforts. Social media was initially seen as a terrific vehicle for public relations, but surprisingly only 9% of respondents reported PR organizations owning the social media channel, which suggests that marketing teams value social media more for its demand generation potential than awareness building. A paltry 5% have a dedicated social media department.

Other notable facts from the survey include:

66% of respondents plan to integrate email and social channels in 2009

48% of respondents have already formulated a strategy for achieving email and social integration

Of marketers planning to increase budgets in 2009, 83% will increase spend in email marketing, followed by social media at 62%

If you are asking yourself where to start, don't worry, you aren't alone. 55% of respondents report that one of their biggest challenges with integrating social media and email marketing is determining metrics by which to measure success. At 48%, establishing business goals for the program is a close second. So here are a few tips on where to start:

Establish goals for the social channel. Is it your objective to use the social outlets for brand building, email list growth or increased revenue? While your objectives could be multi-fold, understanding what they are is the right place to start.

Prioritize your social goals. Now that you have your goals established, apply some logical business measurements to effectively prioritize the goals. Which objectives will require the least start-up versus the need for longer lead times coupled with programmatic implications that can result?

Develop an action plan. It is not realistic to think that you can hit the social world and accomplish all of your objectives by simply posting a Facebook page. Devise a plan and put your best foot forward – you don't want to rush to market with a half-baked plan in any marketing channel, but the viral aspect of social magnifies those mistakes multi-fold, so be cautious.

Based on these findings and what is known about the power of social media, it's clear that it deserves some serious attention and has grown to the stage where it needs an owner and a purpose within marketing.

- Kara Trivunovic, StrongMail Systems

Michael Kelly, Director of Business Development at ClickMail, recently presented at the Silverpop Summit. His presentation on email marketing metrics that matter was so well received, I thought it fitting to recap it here.

Titled "Proving Your Worth with Metrics," Michael's presentation was partly drawn from MarketingSherpa's 2009 Best Practices in Email Marketing Handbook which Michael played a part in pulling together. Get Michael's presentation for a preview of some of the compelling stats and numbers.

Michael covered why to measure, what to measure, and the challenges of measuring, among other topics, including what to do with that data once you have it, and new tools for compiling and learning from that data in real-time.

But why is measuring your data so difficult? Lots of reasons, including conflicting metrics and not knowing what to measure. In the email marketing industry, we suffer from conflicting metrics because there are so many things to measure. We measure how many mailed, delivered, opened, clicked through on and more. The lack of consistency in calculating key performance metrics makes it impossible to establish industry benchmarks or to effectively compare results.

Sometimes we forget that email marketing is about more than just clicks. Email can achieve numerous significant goals beyond a sale. The purpose of email marketing is to trigger an action, not only to get a click. That action might be a forward to a friend, signing up, a visit to a brick-and-mortar store, attending an event, or simply being more aware of a brand.

And knowing all those actions are possible reactions to your email makes measuring even more of a challenge!

Again, we're back to metrics. Remember, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it.

Real danger lurks in not measuring the right factors or not measuring accurately. You could suffer lost revenue. You might not know which messages are working. And your sales team won't know what to focus on. On the other hand, there are huge advantages to knowing your numbers so you can:

Justify your marketing strategy

Prove email marketing is an integral part of your organization's marketing plan

Justify your budget by showing that email provides a far better ROI than any other marketing medium

Know what works and what to improve

Improving click-throughs is one thing, but don't forget to also measure against your company's organizational goals. What is the point of all that email marketing anyway? There is a master goal, the big Kahuna, the big pie-in-the-sky reward your business is focused on. Make sure your email marketing measurements align with helping to achieve that goal. This might be increasing brand awareness or increasing sales.

What we've described here is the ideal world of email marketing metrics. In the real world, they're not so easy to get. Your ESP won't be able to provide you with this kind of data, but companies have found solutions in widgets and what we at ClickMail affectionately call "reportals": online dashboards that use API system calls to access data from ESPs.

You probably already know APIs are highly effective at automating the launching of emails, and managing the flow of data between disparate platforms. Now we at ClickMail are using APIs as a fantastic tool for extracting data to produce actionable reports.

To read about two organizations that have benefitted from the metrics possible with "reportals" and how your business might take advantage of a similar approach, request a copy of Michael's presentation.

Until next time, remember to measure - it's the only way you can improve!

- Marco Marini, ClickMail Marketing

The email marketing industry has never had a consensus around metrics, something that contributes to its reputation as an immature marketing channel. When I heard about the Measurement and Accuracy Roundtable at the eec I was excited to join the metrics conversation and help contribute to solidifying some table-stakes metrics.

Less than a year later we've come up with a proposal - one that represents a large step forward for email marketers. However, it also means a good bit of work. Many email marketing service providers (ESPs), email marketing vendors and individual marketers now have to start considering some new numbers.

This proposal not only calls out where everyone should eventually be, it also provides consistent names for related metrics. For us at ESPs, it means that we can immediately make it clear to our clients where we stand.

A great approach is to embrace an "Educate, Enhance and Evolve" approach. What does that entail?

1. Educate your clients on where they currently stand
Is what you've been calling 'Opens' now defined as the Action Rate? If so, then let them know, that doesn't mean you need to change the name right away, but you should provide a tool tip or a more detailed description in your help guides. Also link to the new standards, or provide your own copy of them within your application. This will empower them to do more with their data.

2. Enhance your current reports with some of the new metrics
You may have been showing just one number, the one you thought best represented 'Opens'. But we've opened the door, there are a number of different metrics which each tell a different story. By providing more of this information you allow your clients to dig deeper into their statistics and gain a better understanding of their recipients. Of course with more information comes more questions; be sure to provide detailed information about how these numbers are calculated as well as why they are important.

3. Evolve from the days of 'Opens'
That's right, the goal here is to stop reporting 'Opens' at all. Do we expect the industry to forget about 'Open Rates' by tomorrow? No, but we do expect the experts to start moving away from it soon. When industry leading ESPs follow suit it will help to create momentum and drive the whole industry forward.

By defining and adhering to industry standards we are enabling all email marketers to converse with the confidence that they are comparing apples to apples. This is a big step in the move towards getting email marketing the respect it deserves as a mature marketing channel.

- Adam Covati, Bronto Software