In his recent Predictions & Unpredictions for 2013 blog post, Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg talked about how brands’ marketing and security functions will need to join forces to fight phishing. One key reason is that phishers and spoofers are continually getting smarter, applying an impressive range of best practices to make their emails ever-more compelling and believable.

• The subject line inspires real concern (especially if you really are a YBS customer!)
• The “Friendly From” is believable (see inset)
• The sender domain is correct (because the real sender is spoofing it!).
• Branding is consistent with the real YBS website.
• The language is professional sounding and there are no spelling mistakes.
• There is a strong, visible call to action – “Click My Account Activity”
• The disclaimer and contact details all appear to be 100% correct.

• It generated a perfectly respectable Spam Assassin score of only 1.5
• It only identified one potential spam trigger word – “Disclaimer”
• It even rendered well on most major mobile devices!

• Nearly 1 in every 20 of these emails successfully bypassing spam filters successfully delivering to recipients’ inboxes.
• Average Read Rate for these emails is 3.66%. This is is particularly startling given that:

1. YBS is a relatively small player in the UK with approximately 1% market share. Assuming that non-YBS customers will almost certainly ignore these emails because they are not relevant, Read Rates for the remainder can be inferred as actually being much higher.
2. In a number of instances the Read Rate is higher than the Not Filtered rate, implying that recipients are recovering these emails from their spam/junk folders and responding to them!

• An authoritative report produced by Cisco Systems shows that on average 99% of phishing emails get filtered, with the remainder generating a 3% open rate. This implies the YBS phishing emails are highly effective, out-performing the Cisco benchmark by a factor of 6.
• Cisco also calculated the commercial impact of a phishing attack at $250 (£155/€190) per compromised recipient. Using the report’s average click-to-open rate of 5%, with 50% of clickers giving up personal data, we can extrapolate the Inbox Insight data to infer an estimated commercial impact in the UK of over £1M pm – for this single scam alone!

• Read our Anti-Phishing Guide which contains actionable advice on how to achieve brand protection and secure your email channel.
• Make use of Return Path’s APS suite of tools and services to:
  • Identify potential brand abuse (Email Brand Monitor).
  • Proactively block phishing and spoofing activity (Domain Protect).
  • Facilitate prosecution or phishing site take-down efforts (Domain Secure).

By Joanna Roberts
Account Manager
Return Path

As an account manager at Return Path, I get to talk to clients about what’s hot in the email world.  I have lots of conversations with clients about the newest trends, and what’s not so popular anymore.  So what’s the next new thing in email marketing?  Responsive email design! 

Have you ever noticed that your carefully crafted email doesn’t always look great on the small screens used for tablets and mobile devices?  Historically, email marketers have designed for the typical 1024 x 768 screen and, because of the typical email preview pane size, have been advised to keep email width around 650 pixels.  However, with the growth of smart phones and tablets, this one-size-fits-all approach isn’t necessarily best practice anymore. 

Here’s where responsive email design comes in.  Using CSS3 coding technique called “media queries,” you can design your email to automatically re-format and re-size itself to optimize for whatever screen size your recipient is using to read your email.  It can also be used to hide non-essential elements of the email from the mobile reader, thus making sure the main call-to-action of the email is easily found, and can change various other elements of the email, including text size and color, background images and background color. 

So how can you think about this in terms of your own emails?  The most basic use of responsive email design is your email layout.  Let’s say your typical email format is a 3-column layout.  Using responsive email design, you can now design two other versions: a two-column layout for tablets and a one-column layout for mobile devices.  This will ensure that your reader is always seeing the most important parts of your email, no matter what size screen they are using. 

Of course, as with any new email trend, it’s important to understand the impact and test the effectiveness of responsive email design.  First, use a tool like Return Path’s Campaign Insight to ensure you have a large enough mobile audience to justify the additional design work.  If you do decide to move forward with responsive email design, use a rendering tool like our Campaign Preview to ensure your responsive email formats correctly in desktop, webmail and mobile views.  One thing to note is that responsive email design works only in the native mail apps in the iPhone and Android.  Recipients reading emails on their mobile devices using either the mobile browser or proprietary email apps (for example, the Gmail app) will see the desktop version of the email.  And finally, don’t forget to track open and click-through rates so you can quantify the impact this new technique has on your email metrics. 

Have you already tried responsive email design?  We’d love to hear more about it!  Please leave a comment below with your feedback, learnings and successes. 

This post originally appeared on Return Path’s In the Know Blog.

Joanna Roberts is an account manager at Return Path. Joanna has over six years of experience in online marketing, and regularly advises companies on email marketing strategy, deliverability, and compliance standards. She enjoys blogging and leading webinars, specializing in the topics of email marketing best practices and strategy, and is often encouraging marketers to push the envelope on their email efforts with new ideas and initiatives.

• How misspelled common domain names (eg Hotmail) in email addresses can impact a marketer's sender reputation.
• A collection of recent mobile email statistics - what is essential to consider before developing a mobile email strategy?
• A guide to help marketers estimate the test cell sample size needed for email split tests.
• Social strategy, rendering in all platforms and dealing with inactive subscribers - here's how to meet seven of today's inbox challenges.

• 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

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

• Member Initiatives
• Speakers Bureau
• Measurement Accuracy

• 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

• Sundeep Kapur,  VP, Strategic Marketing, NCR eCommerce
• Debbie Kane, Director, Web & Partnership Marketing, Active Interest Media
• Aaron Smith, Director, Professional Services, Smith-Harmon, a Responsys Company

1. Ask yourself, "why should my consumer sign up for my email?"
2. Use intrigue versus incentive.
3. Build up 'reverse preferences' (track what people do & don't do).
4. Run subject line tests.
5. Use social media to increase open rates.
6. Test.
7. Analyze.
8. Use web and email designers.
9. Use clear calls to action.
10. Keep important content/messages above the fold.
11. Do respect image blocking and the preview pane.
12. Do render tests.
13. Do create an iron-clad email production process with tasks, individuals, and even days of the week associated with each milestone.
14. Do run a test with every send – and (this is key) – share your results with your stakeholders for short-term visibility; archive them for long-term learnings.
15. Do ask yourself these three questions:
           (1) What is this email about?
           (2) Why do my subscribers care?
           (3) What do they do about it?

1. Don’t assume something works.
2. Don’t convert print promotions directly to email campaigns.
3. Don’t overcomplicate your email creative.
4. Don’t over-mail your list.
5. Don’t under-mail your list.
6. Don’t make subscribing – or unsubscribing – too complicated.
7. Don’t try to say too much with a single email.
8. Don’t silo email – remember your other channels, both offline and digital.
9. Don’t forget about the landing page!
10. Don’t assume what worked yesterday will work today, or tomorrow. Keep testing and evolving!
11. Don't ignore your reports & front line.
12. Don't badger the lifeless (don't over-mail your non-responders).
13. Don't say everything in the subject line.
14. What should I do next? (no call to action)
15. Don't forget to be timely.

When you work in the email space, you take a different perspective on your inbox. I receive email for very different reasons than others in my life. I subscribe to just about any email I can, because I like to see what people are doing. More specifically,  how marketers are targeting their customers, leveraging data, addressing rendering challenges and motivating recipients to open, among many other things.

But "normal" people just don't do that. They subscribe to a specific email because they want it – at least they thought they did. So I thought I would ask the real email subscriber in my life, my husband, what he likes and doesn't like about email – this is what he said (ok, I've paraphrased some, but this is almost what he said):

The Bait and Switch
So, apparently people actually subscribe to email because they expect or want something – go figure, huh? But once they get "it" do marketers continue to deliver value? So my hubby tells me that often times he subscribes for something specific, but if the subsequent emails don't grab him right away then he unsubscribes. Yes, you heard me right, he actually does click the unsubscribe link.

The Fine Print
But he can't click the unsubscribe link if he can't find it – and he actually does look for it. This leads us to the second thing that annoys him about email – ok, it's a life in general thing, but it's prolific in email – the fine print. Now that we have kids, the closest he's getting to Vegas are the emails he gets in his inbox – and nothing drives him more crazy than a great subject line and headline about getting free nights at a great hotel – only to open the message to find that there isn't a snowball's chance he can go. It would just take too long to filter through the legalese.

No Real Point
My better-half tells me that we email marketers have seconds to get to the point otherwise he closes the email. Which in and of itself isn't news – but what surprised me was that he's actually pretty fickle. If we don't make our point quickly in this email – he isn't opening the next one either – or the one after that, or the one after that. He's stubborn…

No Images (Not our fault, but he doesn't know that)
So this was the very first thing he said – and as long as we've been together and all the time I've been working in the space – I was sure he knew this, but he did not. AOL, take note, my husband does not like that you suppress his images by default. The funnier thing for me was that he couldn't figure out why images rendered for Zappos,  but not for Mandalay Bay. He has no recollection of adding Zappos to a safe-sender list, but clearly he did. So in his mind, the issue was with Mandalay Bay, not AOL.

But rest assured, he doesn't dislike everything about us. There is one thing he loves about email and that is Zappos. He's an uber-fan of everything Zappos, but here's a lesson to integrating your customer service calls with your email programs. After an issue he had with shoes he ordered for our son, he called and spoke with someone who was very friendly and helpful and took care of correcting the order issue. He was happy with the customer service he received, and he moved on to other things. A short hour later, he received a coupon for a discount off his next purchase – as a way to say "we're sorry for the recent issue with your order."

So learn from his man-crush on Zappos – sometimes doing something nice goes a long way.

 
- Kara Trivunovic
Senior Director of Strategic Services
StrongMail

Lots of marketers use preheader text, meaning those words that appear at the very top of the email, above any banner or heading. But that text is typically dull and dry, asking to be added to the recipient's address book. Or they link to a web-based version of the email. Bleh. That won't make anyone open your email.

Clever email marketers fit a lot into their preheader text. In a way, it's like multitasking. They ask to be added to the Safe Senders list. They offer a link to a web-based version with images. They have a Forward-to-a-Friend link. And they sell.

There are best practices for preheader text. But before we get into how, here are four reasons why preheader text matters in email marketing:

• Preview panes: Remember that people look first at the From line, then the Subject line, then at the Preview Pane when deciding whether to open your email
• Image blocking: Your preheader text might be all they see in the Preview Pane
• Mobile devices: On that tiny screen, your preheader text has a huge job!
• Snippet text: In Outlook 2007, Gmail and the iPhone, the beginning of your preheader text is displayed following the Subject Line

But the number one reason is you must do everything you can to convince someone to open your email and discover the gems it contains, gems they'll want to act on.

Before you start writing it, first, determine the goal of your preheader text. Your goal might be forwards, getting added to the safe senders list, encouraging opens by picking up where the subject line left off, getting them to a web page so the recipient can see the images, or to a version optimized for mobile. You can do more than one in your preheader area, but you want to prioritize to make sure your most important text is emphasized.

If you thought writing a short enough subject line was hard, now you get to tackle your preheader text, where you face the temptation of just one more word because you have just a little more space. Although your text is small, you don't want to cram too much into your preheader text, or that jumble will get missed rather than noticed. Try to limit it to one or two lines, and make sure you check to see how it's rendering in different email clients.

Formatting becomes crucial with preheader text. You'll want to make sure to maximize your use of that little tiny space, so play with the formatting and check to see how the email renders in different clients. What allows you the most text while keeping the text readable? Chances are it's not centered text. And don't waste precious real estate with spacing between the lines of text.

Successful email marketing ROI is achieved by refining and testing, then refining and testing more. Preheader text is one more piece of the email marketing puzzle that you can continue to improve to improve your overall results.

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

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.

The internet was designed to be a free exchange of information wherein anyone, upon a loose framework mainly having to do with networking and rendering capabilities, could join, share and digest what they wanted. Email was developed as a predecessor to the internet.  Again, one in which, as long as you had the most basic SMTP compliancy between networks, messages would be handed off between point A to B.

Today, email has turned into a monumentally powerful marketing tool and communication channel that still rivals the internet and other upcoming social networks, regardless of which side of the "email is dying" debate you fall under. With email marketing, forward to a friend, sharing links, email filters and forwarders, along with major ISPs providing outsourcing solutions (like Google Apps), the audit trail of an email is sometimes all but impossible to decipher without CSI level forensic header analysis.

But, you don't care about all this.


What should you care about?

When you place an order to have something delivered with the USPS, UPS or FedEx, that item almost never leaves that company's chain of custody.  Meaning, if you dropped it off with FedEx, the recipient will most likely receive it with FedEx.  Again, there are exceptions, but the vast majority of the time this is the rule.  When you send an email out, though, it may be going to a Yahoo! domain address, then forwarded on to a Gmail domain address and finally rendered in Outlook 2007.  What can you do to ensure that your mail has the highest rate of making it to its final destination regardless of the cyber hops in the middle?

1. Ask your recipient up front if their email address is still, indeed, the right one to be using. I check over 8 different email accounts on a normal day, and with inbox email aggregators with dynamic collection addresses (such as OtherInbox), I probably have several hundred email addresses (with OtherInBox I can use disposable email addresses) that will get to me somehow.  However, the email address to sign up with your service when I was a fresh college grad and using my Alumni account may no longer be at the top of my list.  So, I appreciate it when companies I do business with ask me if that's still the one I should have on my account.  If it is, I click through on a prompt when I login.  If not, it takes 2 seconds to change.  I don't get asked this every time I login, but perhaps, every 6 months or so to ensure the email address is fresh.  Guess what?  My Alumni account is forwarded to my Yahoo! account.  So, I changed it to have my Yahoo! account receive the email directly (and thus avoid any errant filtering on the part of my school).

2. Authenticate outbound email. Period. DKIM was designed not to break when making multiple hops in an email's path to the final destination.  Unfortunately SPF will because of the technical nature of email headers, but with DKIM enabled mail, if it comes through at Gmail verified and then is forwarded on to AOL, the DKIM signature stays intact and the message has a higher likelihood of being delivered.

3. Here's the bad part.  Just like you as a sender pushing mail out to a recipient, when email is forwarded to another domain by the recipient domain, the reputation and deliverability of that mail falls back on the ISP doing the forwarding.  For instance, I run my own domain hosted through Gmail.  When you send an email there, it gets forwarded to Yahoo! which is what I consider my central email nervous system.  But, sometimes, email from Gmail gets bulked at Yahoo! because of Gmail's reputation.  This means I don't get my mail.  What can you do about it?  Gently remind your subscribers to check their spam folders for mail that may have accidentally fallen prey to a filter somewhere.  In my case, I'll get email that randomly gets bulked (as opposed to breaking any obvious best sending practices) and have made it a habit to check my spam folder often.

4. Check your content in multiple web clients. Oftentimes, an email sent to a Comcast domain looks fantastic, but when forwarded to an AOL accounts, looks horrible.  Now, like in #3, a lot of this is out of your control if the actual content is changed en route by the ISP.  But, if you ensure that your content looks good in the different clients, you increase your chances that when an ISP doesn't reach in and play with the HTML when it's being forwarded along, it will look fine in the end email inbox.

5. Have unique identifiers in your unsubscribe links tying an email address back to a particular sender.  If I unsubscribe from my Yahoo! address on an email that was sent to me originally at a Gmail account but was forwarded on, you could end up shooting yourself in the proverbial foot.  I could have any wanted email to my Yahoo! account stop but the Gmail email continue.  Recipients will oftentimes setup multiple email addresses for one account, or across multiple accounts you as an ESP or single sender support, so directly tying that recipient's unsubscribed email address to their preferences (and not the one that happened to actually do the unsubscribing) is key.

This is pretty technical stuff, folks.  But, in order to stay on top of the original intent of email being free flowing and having as few barriers as possible, you must be cognizant of the challenges in your path.  Reach out to your technical team to ensure you've got these points covered.  And remember, an email address is easily disposable.  We, as marketers, tend to see them as having high stickiness.  But, recipients can come and go with fluidity and tracking them along the way with their permission (ultimately their keeping you informed of their moves) keeps you in touch with your customers.

Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability
Bronto Software
@ChrisAWheeler

Video in email. Not a week goes by without a webinar, blog or email newsletter mentioning the topic. But is video in email the real deal? Or is it still too early to start whipping out the camcorders and hiring scriptwriters?

To get a better handle on the topic, I turned to ClickMail Marketing's CTO, Cameron Kane, for some insight. Cameron is paying close attention to the video vibe and was deploying video for clients way before the hype. But whether or not video is ready for prime time is the topic I asked him to speak upon.

First off, Cameron says you need to be clear on your motivation. Video can be a good tool to engage prospects or re-engage existing customers. But make sure you'll use it that way. Ask yourself, "Will this really help me engage the customer or am I doing this because it's the next shiny new thing?"

Next, Cameron cautions being aware of the different ways to deliver video. Which method you choose depends in part on your audience and in part on how much success you want.

1. As a static image that clicks through to video on a landing page – This is an image with a Play arrow on it indicating it will start a video. The video starts playing upon the click through.
2. As an animated .gif that plays in the email – Cameron says this is a good way to go if you can get the point of your short video across without sound. "It should be used as more of a lure than the full-blown video," he says. But it will not play if images are suppressed. And it only shows the first frame in Microsoft Outlook 2007, so when you're creating it, you must make your first frame a static image with an arrow (as above) so the user can click through. For this reason, it's a bad choice if you're a B2B marketer as so many business people use Outlook.
3. As certified video that plays in the email with audio (AOL only) – Right now this applies only to AOL, although other ISPs are joining, like Comcast. "I think the expansion into ISPs needs to widen a tad before we can really speak to this," says Cameron. "The home run is if they can get Hotmail, Livemail and Gmail. Then video will be pervasive," he says. Certified video has just come onto the scene and it will be very interesting in watching this playout. The implications on this front go wide and far. I think the best has yet to come.
4. As embedded Flash video: "Very bad idea," says Cameron. "We could do this 5 years ago, but no longer."

Of the four choices above, Cameron recommends using the static image for a B2B audience. If the audience is B2C, he says, start with an animated .gif and do an A/B split test. If the animated .gif works, filter your AOL audience and if that audience is big enough and a lift in revenue would be significant, use the certified video for that segment. "I would see this option as the best for large retailers," he says. Although he also points out Goodmail hasn't done their homework yet on the effectiveness of video and whether or not there's a lift in ROI. "They don't have conclusive data as of yet on the lift a sender would receive if using video," he points out.

If you use video in your email marketing, there are still email best practices to adhere to. Just because you're adapting a new approach and technology doesn't mean the old rules no longer apply. Things to keep in mind when using video in your email marketing include:

• You still have to be relevant and targeted
• It's still email. You're still trying to get the recipient to do something, to take some kind of action
• You still have to measure its impact
• You still have to test
• You have to consider bandwidth and rendering issues

Most of all, perhaps, and this is where the discussion about video in email gets fuzzy, you have to consider image blocking. A recent webinar on video in email hardly spent 10 seconds on the topic, but the reality is, if your recipients have images suppressed, it doesn't matter which method you choose to deliver your video in the email: They won't see it.

As Cameron says, "You have to get them to download images, then view the email and video, then click through. This is all before they hopefully convert. There's lots of room for drop out."

So maybe it's worth waiting a while before you "drop in" to the video in email camp.

- Marco Marini, CEO, 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

One of my favorite quotes in the past few years is from David Daniels of Forrester Research who often says that "sending email to people that haven't opened or clicked in a year is like flying an airplane advertisement over a ghost town." Love it. That visual really brings the point home that mailing to seemingly unengaged subscribers is a waste of time, and often does more harm than good. I have always 100% agreed with it, however I now think it isn't always true. There may actually be life in parts of those seemingly deserted towns.

Let me start by saying that I still recommend all marketers regularly review engagement and modify content and/or frequency to those that haven't opened or clicked in 90 or 180 days. This is especially important for marketers that have deliverability problems, since many of them may improve their reputations and deliverability by cutting this dead weight. Unresponsive list segments, after all, are more likely to generate complaints or to contain spamtraps. In fact, earlier this year we were able to help a client get out of the bulk folder at Gmail by ceasing mailing any names that hadn't opened or clicked there in 90 days. Now, however, when I'm asked by a client if they should re-opt-in subscribers that haven't responded, opened or clicked for months, I'm forced to add the qualifier: "it depends."

Here's why it depends. There is growing evidence that many mailers have at least some subscribers that don't seemingly do anything, but they are valuable nonetheless. Here are a few camps to consider:

1. Hidden Segment #1: Subscribers that view and read emails with images off. There may be some email marketers that are in fact too good at rendering their email titles, main stories and calls-to-action in HTML text. I say "too good" since some (maybe lots) of their subscribers don't register as an open since they never enable images – yet they are actually engaged and reading the emails.

2. Hidden Segment #2: Mobile, invisible, but engaged. Mobile, email-enabled phones now represent a majority of some company's opt-in subscriber base. If they don't render images they won't render an open, but the recipient might be eating up the content day-in and day-out, and the marketer will never know.

3. Hidden Segment #3: Subscribers that never click, or shop online, but buy from your brick-n-mortar store. These actually could be some of your best customers, you just can't tell. Certainly there is life in this ghost town. Multichannel retailers should especially keep a watch out for these subscribers.

4. Hidden Segment #4: Fans that forward your email to friends, but don't use your forward-to-a-friend link. You can't track them since they are using the forwarding mechanism of their email tool, not your trackable link. Jeanniey Mullen's recent ClickZ article highlighted the story of Burntoast Marketing in Australia that had this problem. Some of their mailings to high-quality prospects had "…clicks come from other people both within and outside the same company who were not on the original mailing list."

The bottom line is if you're not looking at subscriber engagement, you are missing out on the ability to improve your deliverability, improve relevancy, and cut the unprofitable names from your list. However, beware of these hidden, engaged subscribers and develop strategies to make them visible.

First, rather than automatically re-opting in unengaged subscribers or discarding them from your list, try reducing frequency. A recent test of ours showed we were able to get 4 times the number of subscribers to reengage by reducing from weekly to monthly mailings when compared to sending a single re-optin campaign.

Second, entice your offline-only shoppers to use a coupon or other tracking code that will help them identify themselves.

Finally, provide a number of ways that recipients can share their emails with their friends – either standard viral links or via new technologies allowing sharing with social networks.

- Chip House, ExactTarget

Following the eec announcement of the Render Rate, some have asked why? Who cares? And what makes the Render Rate better than the other proposed metric—Action Rate—or vice versa?

As outlined in the previous post, How Opens Are Tracked and Reported, there are a large number of scenarios where an open might be tracked. At the most basic level, there are two methods of tracking opens:

1) A unique tracking image inserted into the email was loaded: confirming that the images in the email were rendered.

2) A link in the email was clicked: since obviously a link cannot be clicked if the email was not opened, this method allows us to track some of the people missed by the first method.
Render Rate is calculated using only the first method, while Action Rate is calculated by combining the unique results of both methods.

Advantages of Render Rate

Render Rate has the advantage over Action Rate in two ways:

1) Pre-conversion testing: At the end of the day, most marketers want to look at conversion of some sort. Even so, evaluation of pre-conversion dynamics can be helpful in optimizing a program. Because Render Rate measures only one thing, it is better suited for testing in pre-conversion testing scenarios. If we want to look at the ability of a subject line to get people to look at the email, The Render Rate only measures that one thing. If we use Action Rate to evaluate subject lines we are actually testing two different things: 1) which subject line got more people to view the email with images, and 2) which subject line got more people who didn't view the email with images to click. Since Action Rate would evaluate success based on two different criterions, it is difficult to determine what the subject line actually does best. A better approach is to use Render Rate to answer the question, "Which subject line got more people to look at my email?" and use Click Through Rate to answer the question, "Which subject line gets more people to click on a link?"

One could take subject line testing a step further by analyzing the results in two stages – first look at which subject line had better reach, and then we can look at which subject line eventually drove more people to the landing page. Then we would optimize the landing page to further increase conversions (e.g. sales) in its own tests. In theory, optimizing each step in the process will increase overall conversions, but there are exceptions, so a final test using conversions from emails delivered is recommended.

Render Rate also improves testing of creative elements in email because it limits both the control and the test groups to only a version of the email where we could be sure that images were seen by all subjects in both groups. When addressing the question, "Which creative is most effective at getting people to click?" conduct the test based on the people who we know saw the creative (as measured by renders) and then look at that segment to determine which creative version got the higher percentage of people to click through. This type of evaluation is impossible using Action Rate since by definition, anyone who clicked also opened, which inaccurately implies 100% effectiveness of the creative.

Limiting to the render rate only means that both the control and the test group see the same thing. Some examples of tests – types of imagery used in pictures, call to action placement (preview pane or below), button vs. text links. This can be particularly important to those that write emails that have few links in them (or even just one) – where the placement of that link, whether it be a feedback method or the call to action itself moves based on image rendering.

2) Ad impressions: Many advertisers sell display advertising in email. Render Rate provides accurate measures for how many of those ads were displayed. Since it limits the value of the metric to specifically image based opens (renders) it gives us the true number of total impressions using the total emails rendered. Keep in mind, for image-based advertisers, there is no value of an email for which no images are rendered—Action Rate would provide an artificially inflated view of performance. We could also use the Render Rate to determine reach and frequency in a specific email. Here the unique number of email renders is the reach and the total number is the frequency. When combined with monetization via ad revenue we can construct a traditional direct marketing RFM model.

Of course, Render Rate has its challenges, which is why a second metric has also been proposed.

Advantages of Action Rate

Action Rate has the advantage over Render Rate in two ways:

1) Less Inaccurate Measure of "Opens": Render Rate underreports the number of people who seemingly looked at your email more than Action Rate. However, Action Rate still underreports this number. In reality, no reliable method for determining how many subscribers actually looked at your email exists. Both proposed metrics are estimates. Both are low estimates. Action Rate is simply a slightly closer estimate of the number of people who presumably looked at your email.

Under reporting is one of the primary reasons the eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable recommends a move away from the term Open Rate. Unfortunately, this term has left many marketers with an incorrect understanding of what the metric provides. Worse still, "Open Rates" are calculated different ways by different ESPs—thus the need for standardization.

2) Text-based advertising: Again using the publishing realm as a basis of example, publishers often need to provide reports on text-based advertising. For this purpose, Action Rate is a better standard metric for the reasons listed in the prior section. The Action Rate, which reports, "opens" based on either the rendering of a tracking pixel or a user action (i.e. a click) we can better judge the true number of ad impressions based on action rate. Currently, to our knowledge there is no other industry metric that is defined and standardized that accomplishes this goal.

Use Both to Gain Additional Insights

Finally, using both the Render Rate and the Action Rate together we can learn more about our subscribers and the ways they use emails. For example if you see a regular reader appearing in the list of subscribers that typically views emails with images on and then suddenly drops off the list of those that fit the render rate definition and starts showing up on the action rate only, this may indicate that the subscriber has begun reading their emails with a mobile device. It may also be that they have not added you to their white list, or another set of circumstances may have occurred. The point here, is that using them both we can identify little differences in subscriber behavior that may alert us that it would be worth it to request more feedback from that reader or set off a trigger email to them.

The members of the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable think that if you do adopt our proposed metrics – whether via your ESP or in your own email deployment and reporting in-house system that you will find the Render Rate, the Action Rate and their associated metrics to be superior to current methods—which are inconsistent and sometimes misleading. For those of you that are already defining your open metrics using the Render and Action Rates we congratulate you on being ahead of the times and welcome your support on this initiative and help to spread the metrics throughout the industry so that all email marketers and our stakeholders can have clearer understanding on how our programs work and their effectiveness.

- Luke Glasner, Rodman Publishing & Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget