Measurements

One of the things I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about lately is how we measure deliverability. Standard deliverability measurements include: opens, bounces, complaints, and clicks. There are also other tools like probe accounts, panel data, and public blocklists. Taken together these measurements and metrics give us an overall view of how our mail is doing.


A globe with the words innovation, creativity, inspiration and idea written on it.

More and more, though, I see senders meeting all the standard metrics for these measurements, yet still struggling with deliverability. In many ways this isn’t surprising. There are a whole host of tools out there that allow senders to manipulate the underlying metrics without changing their underlying practices. To complicate matters even more, there are tools that manipulate open and click rates by following every link in an email. Finally, we know that some ISPs don’t send 100% of the “this is spam” messages to their FBL. Other metrics, like probe accounts, are inaccurate in an era of personalised delivery based on activity.

All in all, these metrics were built to tell us things about a mail system that no longer exists. Our next challenge is to figure out what metrics to use in the future. How do we monitor the effectiveness of our address collection processes and our deliverability?

One thing I’ve started having customers look at, especially my ESP clients, is how the consumer ISPs are accepting their mail. Are they seeing temp failures and if they are, what specific mailstreams are the temp failures related to? It’s a little early to tell if this is an effective measurement for ESP compliance purposes. It’s definitely helping identify problematic mail streams for my brand clients and allowing us to make adjustments to get to the inbox.

What I do know is that we in the deliverability space need to continue innovating and thinking about how to measure our deliverability. Mail filters are evolving, and we must evolve as well.

Related Posts

Engagement, Engagement, Engagement

I saw a headline today:
New Research from Return Path Shows Strong Correlation Between Subscriber Engagement and Spam Placement
I have to admit, my first reaction was “Uh, Yeah.” But then I realized that there are some email marketers who do not believe engagement is important for email deliverability. This is exactly the report they need to read. It lays out the factors that ISPs look at to determine if email is wanted by the users. Senders have to deal with vague metrics like opens and clicks, but the ISPs have access to user behavior. ISPs can see if mail is replied to, or forwarded or deleted without reading. They monitor if a user hits “this-is-spam” or moves the message to their junk folder. All of these things are signals about what the users want and don’t want.
Still, there are the folks who will continue to deny engagement is a factor in deliverability. Most of the folks in this group profit based on the number of emails sent. Therefore, any message about decreasing sends hurts their bottom line. These engagement deniers have set out to discredit anyone who suggests that targeting, segmentation or engagement provide for better email delivery and getting emails to the inbox.
There’s another group of deniers who may or may not believe engagement is the key to the inbox, but they don’t care. They have said they will happily suffer with lower inbox delivery if it means they can send more mail. They don’t necessarily want to discredit deliverability, but they really don’t like that deliverability can stop them from sending.
Whether or not you want to believe engagement is a critical factor in reaching your subscribers, it is. Saying it’s not doesn’t change the facts.
There are three things important in deliverability: engagement, engagement, engagement.

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Improving Gmail Delivery

Lately I’m hearing a lot of people talk about delivery problems at Gmail. I’ve written quite a bit about Gmail (Another way Gmail is different, Gmail filtering in a nutshell, Poor delivery at Gmail but no where else, Insight into Gmail filtering) over the last year and a half or so. But those articles all focus on different parts of Gmail delivery and it’s probably time for a summary type post.

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Meaningless metrics

I’ve been having some conversations with fellow delivery folks about metrics and delivery and bad practices. Sometimes, a sender will have what appear to be good metrics, but really aren’t getting them through any good practices. They’re managing to avoid the clear indicators of bad practices (complaints, SBL listings, blocks, etc), but only because the metrics aren’t good.
This made me laugh when a friend posted a link to a Business Insider article about how many website metrics aren’t useful indicators of the business value of a website.  Then I found the original blog post referenced in the article: Bullshit Metrics. It’s a great post, you should go read it.
I’d say the concluding paragraph has as much relevance to email marketing as to web marketing.

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