Comments on: Standard Email Metrics

By: Dror Zaifman

Dror Zaifman — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:47:51 +0000

The email marketing industry needs to have standards. If each vendor calculates differently how certain metrics are presented to clients, the clients questions these numbers, how they were calculated and if they can relay on them.

When there are standards within an industry it leads to trust and better relationship between vendors and clients.

By: The Proverbial Barry

The Proverbial Barry — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:18:02 +0000

why should i give you an fbl what does it do for me and my users? you sholdnt be spamming them in teh first plcae.

By: Peter Roebuck

Peter Roebuck — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:34:01 +0000

Dave, I’d love to accurately measure or even somewhat accurately measure complaints but ISPs and email clients don’t tell us every time somebody hits the spam button so we’ve got nothing to measure. We’re limited to a small handful of ISPs that do report back via their Feedback Loops. I tend to watch unsubscribe rates as a measure of complaints since it’s ISP independent and also telling me that the recipient is in effect complaining about the content or frequency of our email.

By: dave

dave — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:42:16 +0000

Thanks for the responses John and Peter!

Given that some metrics have the ‘under reported’ warning, such as render rate, I don’t see why complaints are not included. If we’re meant to only measure things in our control than I would think we could only report on metrics at the server/conversation level since that at least is governed by some standards.

Adding complaints as a metric puts the onus on the adopting ESPs to report on this information in a consistent way, which seems to be in the spirit of the standard.

By: Peter Roebuck

Peter Roebuck — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:18:59 +0000

Dave, I wish more ISPs would do more with feed back loops to help ESPs measure, identify and process complaints. For now, we can only rely on the reports from larger ISP’s that do provide this data and impute what that means for the rest of the lists. As an ESP, we’d love to to remove every single spam complaint immediately as it’s clear that the recipient doesn’t want the email any longer and in many cases the “spam” button works just as well as an “Unsubscribe” button in the eyes of the recipient.

Thanks Laura for explaining some of the new S.A.M.E. reporting standards and encouraging others to learn more. Your opinion counts.

By: John Caldwell

John Caldwell — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:00:04 +0000

Good question, Dave.

The Email Measurement Accuracy Roundtable addressed only those calculations that email deployment vendors have control of in regards to metrics reporting.

By: dave

dave — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:23:47 +0000

The only metric that appears to be missing is ‘complaints’, should that be included?