2007 Deliverability Survey and Whitepaper Executive Summary
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"The State of Email Metrics & Bounce Management"
Email has clearly evolved from a novel way of exchanging information into being the pivot point for online communication and commerce. However, email metrics and bounce management are two specific areas that have not kept pace with email's evolution. While essential to evaluating and enabling successful email programs, these critical practices vary widely among email marketers and the service providers that support them.
To assess the current state of email metrics and bounce management, the Deliverability Roundtable of the Email Experience Council fielded complementary surveys to Mailers and Email Service Providers in October 2006. 321 Mailers and 29 ESPs responded representing a cross-section of both groups.
The surveys revealed a lack of standards around industry metrics, bounce data, definitions and bounce management practices. As a result, the surveys revealed the inability of Mailers and ESPs to properly execute, measure and compare results on their programs.
In evaluating the combined data, the surveys showed a significant variance in how senders calculate key metrics such as delivery, open and click rates. The lack of consistency in calculating key performance metrics makes it impossible to establish industry benchmarks or compare results across programs, providers or channels.
For example, while four-fifths of ESPs calculate "delivered" by deducting all failures from total mailed, the remaining one-fifth calculate it by deducting only hard bounces from total mailed. Consensus for Mailers is even less pronounced. In fact, two-thirds of Mailers expressed uncertainty as to how delivery was calculated, or just guessed. Methodologies for calculating open and click rates were even more convoluted and inconsistent.
Despite the importance of deliverability to both Mailers and ESPs, the surveys revealed considerable confusion around one of the key processes effecting deliverability – bounce management. There’s widespread industry disagreement on how bounces should be defined and treated, and an acute lack of visibility into specific bounce reasons. The surveys also highlight a problem with inconsistent bounce data being provided by ISPs.
Collectively, these issues pose a significant, bottom line risk to email marketers who are unable to adequately measure their results, clean their lists, improve their practices and safeguard their reputations because of inconsistent metrics and unreliable or inadequate data.
Email is the only direct marketing channel that lacks a standardized set of metrics. The survey results in this white paper validate the need for such metrics as well as common definitions and uniform practices. The next step is for industry groups, analysts and influencers to come together and establish them. The eec Deliverability Roundtable hopes this white paper will serve to facilitate such consensus.
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