I’ve been sitting on this one for about a week, after the folks over at IBM/Pivotal Veracity called me to tell me about this. But now their post is out, so I can share.
There are ISPs providing real metrics to senders: QQ and Mail.ru. Check out Laura Villevieille’s blog post for the full details.
A friend of the blog contacted me earlier today and pointed out that the news that Dan posted about Yahoo and engagement that I blogged about last week was actually reported by George Bilbrey in a Mediapost article on August 1.
Read MoreJeanne Jennings published an interesting bit of research on open rates and inbox rates at ClickZ recently. Essentially she looked at two different industry studies and compared their results.
The first study was the Return Path Global Delivery Survey and the second was the Epsilon North American Trend Results. What Jeanne found is that while Return Path shows a decrease in inbox placement, Epsilon is seeing an increase in average open rate.
There are any number of reasons this could be happening, including simply different ways the numbers are calculated. I am not sure it’s just a numbers issue, though. Many of Epsilon’s clients are very big companies with a very experienced marketing team. The Return Path data is across their whole user base, which is a much broader range of marketers at different levels of sophistication.
I expect that the Epsilon data is a subset of the Return Path data, and a subset at the high end at that. It does hint, though, that when the inbox is less cluttered, recipients are more likely to open the commercial mail that does get in there.
The EEC has been working on standardizing metrics used in email marketing. They have published a set of definitions for different terms many email marketers use. They published their Support the Adoption of Email Metrics (S.A.M.E) guide in June.
Under the new EEC definitions an open is measured when either a tracking pixel is displayed or a user clicks on any link in the email, including the unsubscribe link. Open rate is defined as the number of opens (either unique or total) divided by the number of accepted emails. Accepted emails equals the number of emails sent minus the number of emails rejected by the ISP for any reason.
The authors do caution, however, that even their measurements may under count the number of email subscribers that actually open or read an email. Some readers don’t load images or click on links but happily read and digest the content being sent. Others may not click on a link but actually visit a website or brick and mortar store to purchase something based on the email.
Overall, I think the definitions created by the S.A.M.E. group accurately reflect the things they want to measure within the limits of what is actually measurable. Their definitions won’t affect conversations in the short term, but are likely to drive change to standard terminology over the longer term. I do strongly encourage people to grab a copy of their document and see how their definitions compare with your current measurements.