The Big Australian Report signals a significant rise in the volume of marketing messages sent to Australian consumers. For example, Australian companies sent three times as many mobile messages, ten times as many social messages and one third more emails last financial year in comparison to the previous financial year. Despite increased use of mobile and social channels, email marketing remains the central and most used channel, and the highest volume by a considerable margin. Of the marketers surveyed, not surprisingly 100% are sending emails to customers and members.

Also noteworthy is the massive increase in the number of companies using data to understand and segment their customers, ensuring that marketing messages are increasingly targeted and relevant to their audience.

Other key findings include:

• More than three quarters (77%) of large Australian companies are using social networks for lifecycle marketing activities, with 63% “significantly increasing” focus on social, primarily with Facebook and Twitter.
• Nearly one in three (30%) companies is sending mobile messages to customers, primarily alerts such as reminders and confirmations. There was also a 300% increase in number of emails opened on mobile devices.
• For the first time, the majority (62%) of Australian companies are tailoring their campaigns and messages according to preferences or behavior of their customers.
• As companies better understand their customers, they have moved from broadcast to targeted campaigns meaning that emails are sent to fewer people for whom the message is relevant. For example, the number of campaigns increased 115% while number of emails rose only 33%.
• 42% of direct marketing campaigns include a social element.

Responsys Asia Pac Vice President, Simon O’Day, believes the past financial year was a watershed for Australian companies in terms of digital direct marketing.

“As Australian companies face the threat of online sales from overseas, they have woken up to the tactics used by these competitors and sought to implement them here,” Mr. O’Day said. “As a result, capturing and using data to understand the customer has become a priority for most marketing departments. It’s no longer enough to send the same message to all your customers and see if any of them actually care or respond, while other companies are creating genuine relationships through a cross channel approach.”

Mr. O’Day added, “Social media has also evolved from experimental to a genuine marketing channel that’s targeted and measurable. This coming year we expect a growing shift from email to cross channel campaigns that leverage mobile, social and the web. And, segmentation and targeting will continue to be critical to achieving dramatic increases in ROI.”

The study undertaken by Responsys analyzed more than one billion emails, mobile and social messages sent by large Australian companies between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011, as well as results from a survey of 350 enterprise marketers in Australia.

Obtain a copy of the complimentary 2011 Responsys Big Australian Report.

The eec members have spoken wisely – our new roster of Member Roundtable co-chairs is an impressive list of email marketing industry luminaries.  Please welcome our 2011-12 Roundtable and Advisory Committee Leadership:

• Cross-Channel Integration Roundtable: Colleen Petitt, Aprimo; Dwight Sholes, Sholes LLC
• Deliverability & Rendering Roundtable: Dennis Dayman, Eloqua; Matt Rausenberger, Return Path
• Email Design Roundtable: Lynn Baus, Responsys; Garrett Ryan, Leo Burnett and Arc Worldwide
• List Growth & Engagement Roundtable: Ryan Phelan, BlueHornet; Nate Romance, ExactTarget
• Measurement Accuracy Advisory Committee: John Caldwell, Red Pill Email; Luke Glasner, Glasner Consulting
• Member Initiatives Advisory Committee: Joel Book, ExactTarget; Stephanie Miller, Return Path
• Speakers Bureau Advisory Committee: Lana McGilvray, Datran Media; Dori Thompson, Information era marketing + consulting

Thank you to all who voted and congratulations to our winners!  We look forward to another great year of productive and useful work on behalf of the industry.

eec Members: Want to join our initiatives?  Check out the Roundtables and sign up today by emailing Ali - ali@emailexperience.org.

The DMA UK’s Email Marketing Council maintains a blog featuring Council members writing about a wide range of topics relating to email marketing.

Here are this month’s highlights:

• An example of how to use email and social to drive both list growth and sales. 
• A recent Return Path study confirms that a marketer’s sender reputation is the key to achieving high inbox placement rates and avoiding the spam folder.
• ISPs have been announcing various types of inbox filtering – here’s a look at how they might impact marketers.
• Frameworks are used in many different industries to structure thinking, people and processes effectively – here’s how they can be applied to email marketing. 
• Email marketing produces a huge volume and range of metrics; using a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed,  Realistic, Time Bound) approach will help marketers measure their specific ROI.

Members of the eec Measurement Accuracy Advisory Committee have answered marketers' cry for new best practices around email measurement.  The Email Metrics Best Practices Guide will help marketers move beyond just reviewing render (open) and click rates to gain an understanding of their subscribers' behavior by including additional data available.

Download this document to learn what email marketers should be tracking beyond renders (opens) and clicks, what sources and types of data marketers can use to calculate various metrics, how to define key success indicators and finally, how to use them to reach marketing goals such as increased revenue, customer lifespan, engagement and more.  Get your copy from the eec Research Store today!

Guide Contributors:
Adam Holden-Bache, Email Transmit
John Caldwell, RedPillEmail
Luke Glasner, RedPillEmail
Loren McDonald, Silverpop
Stephanie Miller, Aprimo
Fred Tabsharani, Port25

eec members can access all eec research including whitepapers, best practices guides and more at no cost.  Find out how to become a member.

Plus, find out more about the eec's S.A.M.E. (Support Adoption of Metrics for Email) Project, also developed by the Measurement Accuracy Advisory Committee.


- Luke Glasner
Co-Chair of the Measurement Accuracy Advisory Committee

The eec's Cross-Channel Roundtable is working toward developing a checklist for email marketers to audit their existing email marketing programs or to use as a guide to kickstart cross-channel marketing. 

We started out by defining cross-channel versus multi-channel. Below we have developed 10 of the 11 key principles/steps that we feel will define cross-channel marketing.

1. Establish goals (sales, engagement) - Identify what it is you want to accomplish in specific, quantifiable terms and get buy-in on the goals from across the organization.
2. Determine what programs you need to run to meet your goals - Once you know what you want to accomplish, determine what the best execution methods for these programs should be (mobile, email marketing, social media, direct mail, etc…).
3. Get buy-in (executive sponsorship) - Form an Internal Team of Champions. You may run into resistance knocking down barriers and trying new ways to communicate with customers and prospects.  An executive champion in your company will be critical to getting through these issues.
4. Bridge departmental silos - Get teams working together.  Cross-channel marketing often involves different disciplines and departments; create a new mindset and don't let established silos hinder your progress.
5. Data collection - Identify what data you need to do the segmentation and communication for the communication programs you’ve defined.  See if you have the data somewhere in your organization before you ask customers to provide it.  Consider the value of behavioral data over self reported data.
6. Walk before you run - Don't expect to do full-blown cross-channel campaigns.  Identify certain channels & focus on goals to show quick wins.  Establish meaningful goals within manageable boundaries so you can begin.  Starting small is better than delaying big.
7. Early success for automation and segmentation - Technology is an enabler, not a crutch.  Use success from manual or small tests to show higher ROI, then forecast future success based on those increased levels of performance.  Don’t just go out and buy technology to solve your problem.  Understand your issues and your goals and if you need automation to accomplish them or technology to track progress, then seek out the right product for your needs.
8. Don't force it - Understand the strength of each channel and how it works best in a cross-channel campaign and use it accordingly…don’t try to force fit.  Just because it works for someone else, doesn’t mean it works for your company or business (i.e. social for community engagement and input).
9. Consistently measure progress set up for success - Establish well-defined business rules based on what you’re trying to accomplish.
10. Test, test, and test again - Keep testing for higher optimization and to ensure customer behavior has not changed over time.
11. WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! HELP US FILL IN THIS LAST SPOT

These are the top principles we have defined; before we write them in stone, we want to hear from you!  Is there something you feel is missing when it comes to being a cross-channel marketer?  What do you feel should be the eleventh principle?

Please be sure to leave comments and thoughts below or send one of the Roundtable chairs an email: Colleen Petitt at Aprimo: colleen.petitt@aprimo.com or David Hibbs at Responsys: dhibbs@responsys.com.


- Colleen Petitt
Aprimo
co-chair of Cross-Channel Roundtable

 

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

 

 

Measuring and monitoring subscriber engagement is a hot topic in the email marketing world these days.

The eec’s List Growth and Engagement Roundtable has launched a survey to identify how email marketers are addressing subscriber engagement within their own email programs.

Individual responses from the survey will be kept confidential and survey respondents will receive aggregate summary results to see how they stack up. The survey should take about ten minutes to complete – take the survey now.

Thank you for your participation!

All year long, the eec Member Roundtables and Advisory Committees work hard to produce relevant, timely content to help you become a better email and digital marketer.  Members who participate in these groups are truly the backbone of the eec and of the industry.

Now's your chance to get involved and make a difference in the email marketing industry!  Members can email Ali to sign up.

We have 4 active Roundtables:

• Cross-Channel Integration
• Deliverability & Rendering
• Email Design
• List Growth & Engagement

And we have 3 active Advisory Committees:

• Member Initiatives
• Speakers Bureau
• Measurement Accuracy

Thoughts from the first meeting of the Cross-Channel Integration Roundtable
co-chaired by Jeff Chamberlain of Aprimo and David Hibbs of Responsys.

The charter of the Roundtable is to explore cross-channel integration to provide education and/or information that would help eec members and the larger email marketing community in pursuing this goal.  Here are the themes to what we are trying to accomplish:

1. Address the needs to “get started” by helping marketers understand the initial steps that might lead to integrated marketing leveraging an existing email channel.
2. Utilize email marketing best practices to help inform what we decide to provide to the community.
3. Look at simple tools that are easy to apply rather than just focus on deep insights or case studies that are interesting but don’t inform clear action for marketers.

Our initial group (still welcoming new members) had a discussion on cross-channel integration. I’ll introduce the team through the discussion summary.  eec Vice Chair Stephanie Miller of Aprimo kicked off the call and started us down the road to group discussion.

Challenge #1 – What is Cross-Channel Integration??

Jeff Chamberlain of Aprimo suggested that cross-channel integration spoke to presenting a marketing message via multiple communication channels to address the different needs driven by preference, buying cycle stage, etc.

Sheryl Biesman of Pharmavite pointed out the channel also refers to distribution from a CPG perspective so we need to be clear about integrating communication channels or distribution channels.

Dwight Sholes of Sholes LLC offered the perspective to focus on direct channels (those designed to directly influence action or response such as email marketing or direct mail as opposed to awareness like print ads or signage).  We accepted the fact that there is a large definition of cross-channel integration and that we would narrow down our target as we come up with different projects…which led to some discussion/brainstorming on possible projects we could do to pursue our charge as a group (trumpets blaring charge heard in the distance…). 

Here is a sampling of the ideas discussed:

• Focus on nuts & bolts…how to get started…benchmarks…how to get it done.
• Provide metrics for how to measure success and case studies on how it has been successful.
• How to get it done easily.  Much of the material out there is intimidating on getting the resources (people, money) to get going.
• Create a checklist to help people know they are addressing the right issues - a Cross-Channel Maturity Audit
• Help people learn how to unify a single communication piece & communicate it across multiple channels.  Keep in mind how a message differs for different channels.
• Help people test.  How to choose the right channels.  How to choose the right campaigns for testing cross-channel integration.
• Focus on how to best combine traditional and new marketing channels (e.g. email marketing and social media, blogging and events)
• Since we are doing this for email marketers, maybe we should investigate whether one channel (e.g. email marketing) should be the hub of your cross-channel marketing strategy.

This would force us to think through the aspects of cross-channel marketing and define some logical next steps.  It could be a good way to gather status and thoughts from others.  Let's do it!

And so there you are…our first challenge…define the aspects of a Cross-Channel Maturity Audit.  We’ll dive in at our next meeting in November.

Intrigued and want to join us?  Contact Ali at the eec.


- Jeff Chamberlain, Cross-Channel Integration Roundtable co-chair
VP, B2B Solutions Marketing
Aprimo

Despite some of the buzz you might be hearing, don’t think the “best time to send” discussion can be tabled as no longer relevant. To maximize your email marketing ROI, you must still discover the day and the time that give you the highest response rate and return on your investment.

Are you already operating off of some “best time to send” assumptions? As marketers, we want to default to industry best practices and well-publicized case studies. But as email marketers, we are able to—and must—test, not take for granted. Rather than rely on the results of others, we must discover our own. And there’s a real danger in following the crowd. When they say Tuesday is the best day to send and then everyone sends on Tuesday, then what? Tuesday leads to crowded inboxes.

The fact is, the industry doesn’t determine your best time to send; your audience does. And you can only learn that by testing.

Beyond knowing it’s the audience who decides, you must also be clear about what you’re measuring. Number delivered? Opens? Click-throughs? Conversions? Total revenue? Then instead of asking “What’s the best time to send?” the question could be, “Which day and time gives us the highest (insert metric here)?”

Know what your metrics really mean. If your metric is revenue, remember that an email opened is not necessarily an email acted upon. The recipient might be curious enough to look beyond the preview pane, but not ready to buy.

This is especially true with mobile devices. Sure, mobile means 24x7 access to email but that probably doesn’t impact your optimum send day. Just because people see their email 24x7 doesn’t mean they respond to it or even really pay attention to it. A relatively safe assumption is that people are less likely to respond to a marketing email on their PDA or BlackBerry. They’ll wait until they are back at their computer to actually respond to—or buy—something.

Also keep in mind that depending on how your audience is segmented, you might have more than one best time to send. For example, the stay-at-home mom can get your email during the day because she’s online and checking her inbox while the kids are at school. But the working mom has to get it after the kids are in bed and she’s catching up on personal email before she turns out the lights.

To determine your own best time for sending by testing, first be clear on your goal. Which metric are you aiming to improve? Then test to that metric, segmenting as much as you can to optimize the delivery day and time for each of your different audiences.

One of our clients is a national home builder. Through testing they’ve learned Friday is the best day to send emails about open houses because they know their audience is planning to spend Saturday touring new home models. Or consider the outdoor equipment retailer that also sends their promotional emails on Friday afternoons. They’ve learned their young, male audience doesn’t plan their weekend activities until Friday afternoon, so the retailer times their emails to coincide with when their audience is beginning to think about Saturday’s fun. If these two companies followed the crowd, imagine the negative impact on their email marketing ROI. They’d be emailing on Tuesdays…and getting totally ignored.

The success of these email campaigns is testament to the importance of knowing when your audience will be most likely to respond to your promotional email. Maybe it’s time for a better “best time to send” discussion, not an end to the discussion.


- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Take a short survey from the eec’s List Growth and Engagement Roundtable covering best practices for building and maintaining high-performing email lists:

• Deliverability
• Segmentation
• Sourcing
• Measurement
• Automation
• Brand

The survey is divided into six sections and should take less than 10 minutes to complete. All individual results from the survey will be kept confidential. Aggregate results and analysis, including recommendations in key areas of interest, will be made available in the future via the eec site.

Thank you for your participation!

We all want a big email marketing list, but we also want to respect subscriber interests, protect the assets of our email program and maintain a solid foundation for revenue growth.  There is a bit of a high wire balancing act sometimes when our organizational goals include having *both* a large and active file.

At this month’s meeting of the eec's List Growth & Engagement Roundtable, a group of industry practitioners discussed a common – and often uncomfortable – situation of email marketers everywhere.  The boss says in that big, growly voice, “Get me a big file of email subscribers - now!”  Yet, the types of tactics that grow a list aggressively can have real risks for response, loyalty and inbox deliverability – which puts your entire program in danger.  No level of growling will change that result.  Here are some ideas from the group about how to approach this somewhat tricky balancing act.   

“I remember a million member push program from one of our clients that was successful in building a big file, but created inbox deliverability and sender reputation problems for many, many months,” says Nancy Harris, Sr. Manager of Deliverability at Fishbowl.  A restaurant wanted to get one million subscribers in their restaurant e-club (a loyalty program).  The promotion was intended to encourage current members to invite lots of friends in order to win a big cash prize. The new member would receive a free meal for joining the program.  “It worked on one level,” Nancy says.  “It was successful in reaching a lot of people and they did reach their goal of one million subscribers.. 
 
“The problem was that the list quality was terrible.  We immediately saw blocking and blacklisting due to unknown users (bounces) and complaints, which took us more than a few months to correct.   Not only did this client have ongoing inbox deliverability issues, but there were also questions about the quality of the people who became new members.  They were not really interested in dining at this restaurant regularly, or receiving ongoing email communications from them.”
 
If that restaurant did the math, they may find that this program was successful in the short term. It cost them some number of tens of thousands of dollars to set up and run the promo and they got a million new members.  Remember, too, that email is a lot cheaper to send than printed postcards – and it’s very efficient in terms of time to market, so this ROI was returned quickly. The cost per new member was very small.    Short term, that could make sense.  However, long term, they destroyed their sender reputation and did not receive revenue from the majority of the new members – these people were not committed to the restaurant and did not frequently dine there.
 
This business cycle issue haunts many an email marketing decision, says Stephanie Miller of Return Path.   “Short term, you can broadcast to your file and you earn revenue.  Long term, however, you may see serious consequences, all of which have a real cost.”
 
Consider these factors in determining the cost of the new subscriber acquired through a sweeps or promotion like the million member push described above:

1. Depressing your sender reputation due to high complaints (which limits your email marketing opportunity for all subscribers by limiting access to the inbox) – this could be a drop in inbox placement of 10% - 50% of your file every time you mail;
2. Churning your file – people who leave by complaints, unsubscribe or filtering – and need to be replaced at some cost per subscriber;
3. Lower loyalty of good customers by bothering them with irrelevant promotions – the cost of this could be a penny a person or it might be higher depending on the type of brand relationship you need for your business;
4. Losing the opportunity for future email marketing because they unsubscribed, complained or are just ignoring you from now on.

“When you calculate the true cost of the aggressive list growth program, factor in these costs as well.  And then make a business decision based on long term customer value and satisfaction,” Stephanie says.
 
“We run into this balancing dilemma when we suggest a list hygiene or list cleansing audit,” says ExactTarget's Nate Romance who is also co-chair of the Roundtable.  Most clients see value in doing a re-engage and send a win back campaign to the portion of the file which is non-active, Nate says.  “However, many will opt for reduced frequency as opposed to suppression of those subscribers who have not responded in a long time. That allows them to keep a big number for list size.”
 
Nate says that when he starts to discuss these issues with marketers, some see the value in keeping “dead” or “nearly dead” records on the file because with a baseline of zero, any interaction will be a rise in response.  However, usually it takes more than just continued hammering at the inbox door, he says.  “Sometimes sending the best of the best offer that month rather than weekly will increase response rates,” he recommends.  The rest of the group agreed, however, that dialing back frequency has not ever significantly improved response rates.  “The risk to your sender reputation is real when you keep non responsive records on the file,” adds Stephanie of Return Path.  “I never think that risk is worth the small chance that a couple people will respond at some future point.”
 
Nancy from Fishbowl adds that a similar practice is common when marketers try to build a list quickly – they sacrifice quality for quantity.  “I see a lot of what I call ‘deceptive list building,’” she says.  This is when a marketer does a sweeps or promotion with vague email permission just to build the file quickly.  “That lack of express consent can be a problem for deliverability and response rates and has a real cost for determining the value of such a venture.”
 
Such practices often are not well measured, and so it’s hard to determine the impact – good or bad.  “When someone gets more aggressive they might do campaigns that are intended to build the list quickly and then they don’t track by source so that we can’t always associate the promotions with complaints and response (or lack of),” Nate from ExactTarget says.  “I always recommend that we tag these folks or track source so that in six months we can check the quality of the list and the real success of the campaign.” 
 
“It’s so interesting that we marketers are good at thinking about LTV of a subscriber when we pay for them – as in a media buy or PPC search campaign,” Stephanie adds. “But when we acquire email subscribers through these “organic’ measures, we don’t always track by lifetime value, we track by the initial sign up.” 
 
Nancy agrees.  “The value of someone when they are new to the file may be different than the same person six months down the road.  We often see that there comes a point, especially for smaller files, that the file stabilizes at a certain number because of loss. New subscribers come in at a steady pace, but subscribers are also lost due to list aging and fatigue,” she says. 
 
That is a very good argument for making sure that list growth is an ongoing commitment, and not a onetime promotion. 
 
What are you doing to consistently grow your email file with active subscribers? Do some of these points resonate? Please comment below, or join the eec List Growth & Engagement Roundtable to participate in future discussions like this.


- Stephanie Miller
Vice Chair, eec
VP, Global Market Development, Return Path

The eec members have spoken wisely – our new roster of Member Roundtable co-chairs is an impressive list of industry luminaries.  Please welcome our 2010-11 Roundtable Leadership:

• List Growth & Engagement Roundtable: Amy Bills, Bulldog Solutions; Nate Romance, ExactTarget
• Deliverability & Rendering Roundtable: Dennis Dayman, Eloqua; Michelle Pelletier, Return Path
• Speakers Bureau: Diksha Dua, Clementine Digital Boutique; Lana McGilvray, Datran Media
• Email Design Roundtable: Lynn Baus, Responsys; Megan Walsh-Regard, Williams-Sonoma
• Cross-Channel Integration Roundtable: Jeff Chamberlain, Aprimo; David Hibbs, Responsys
• Member Initiatives Roundtable: Joel Book, ExactTarget, Stephanie Miller, Return Path
• Measurement in Email Project: John Caldwell, Red Pill Email; Luke Glasner, Glasner Consulting

Thank you to all who voted and congratulations to our winners!  We look forward to another great year of productive and useful work on behalf of the industry.

New projects are starting in September; what would you like the eec to be working on?  Want to join our initiatives?  Check out the Roundtables and sign up today by emailing Ali.

Email marketing has made significant improvements over the years. As a whole, the industry has improved email marketing strategy, message design, targeting and delivery. But one area that hasn't improved is tracking metrics. ESP's are still using the same metrics that have been in place for years. It's time for that to change.

For the past 2 years, the eec's Measurement Accuracy Roundtable has been developing a new set of email marketing measurement standards called the Support Adoption of Metrics for Email (SAME) project. 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.

The reasons why the email marketing industry needs the new metric standards are numerous. They include:

1. The ability for all marketers to benchmark their results against the metrics from any delivery platform
2. The ability for the industry to aggregate results knowing that all source data was acquired using the same definitions
3. The ability to compare data across multiple systems and databases
4. The ability to better integrate metrics with other platforms, such as CRM system

Because of the benefits of the new metrics, many ESPs are adopting the new standards or are planning to do so.  At Email Transmit, we've made an update to our tracking area to provide our clients with access to the new metrics. Our interface now defaults to the new eec metrics and we've allowed clients to continue to view traditional metrics as well. 

While implementing the new metrics we've also provided their definitions so marketers can fully understand how the results are calculated. Client feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, as clients are able to get more usable data from their campaign results. 

Are you ready for the next step in email metrics? Start by signing the petition, then read the definitions and commit to incorporating the new metrics or contact your ESP and ask them to support the project. 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 Q. Holden-Bache
CEO/Managing Director
Mass Transmit, developer of Email Transmit
Connect with Adam on Twitter and LinkedIn

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.

What happens after you send out that carefully crafted email campaign? What do you look for beyond open rates and click throughs? What do people actually do when they get to your landing page or website? And are you able to not only track that information, but put it to use in your next campaign?

• How often data is flowing from the analytics provider to your ESP and how quickly do you need to make decisions based on that data? If you can wait 24 hours to get data back, then a batch process is fine. However, if you’re looking at shopping cart abandonment, and you need to react right away to a behavior, you need something more real-time so you’ll want an inline process that allows immediate reaction, without the delay of a batch process.
• What segments are important, and what information do you need in order to allocate or define the segments?
• What is your internal availability for building an API now plus supporting it later? Do you want your IT team to take this on, working with your marketing team? Do they know the ESP well enough, and can they support the integration when something goes wrong? Or should you outsource this?
• How easy is it to migrate if you switch ESPs? You have to make sure your new ESP can tag links to where your analytics package can easily identify the same information for a person, and for a campaign. That new ESP is also going to need to be able to consume data from the analytics company, send and consume data back and forth from the analytics package.
• As a preventive measure, your marketing department needs to acid test the solution. You have two separate systems operating relatively independent of each other, but you need to regularly make sure the information going back into both systems is accurate.

When your email and web analytics are integrated as a closed-loop process, it should be seamless. Your ESP sends an email and links within the email include identifiers of who that recipient is and the campaign they’re being sent. When they click on a link, the ESP feeds that information over to the analytics provider on a batch basis. You’ll learn about the campaign performance, but also specific metrics about who did what individually once on the site. But that’s not the end of it. The web analytics can also feed information back to your ESP, enabling automated responses or other email messages appropriate to a customer’s particular actions. Then you take all you’ve learned and tweak your next campaign accordingly. 

 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