Know Your ESP
Until the standards are in place, it is of utmost importance that you know how your email service provider tracks results, and you must be sure to track the same data in the same way across every campaign in order to get an accurate comparison. Or, at the very least, you must be sure that you completely understand the measurement of each metric so you can make a true “apples to apples” comparison.
For example, if you are tracking the number of emails that were delivered from a particular campaign, you must know how your ESP counts a message as being delivered. According to the Email Experience Council, 11 percent of ESPs count every single message that was sent as being delivered. Another 63 percent, including Listrak, subtract the total number of failed messages (hard and soft bounces) from the total number of emails sent to provide more accurate results. However, there are additional programs available that can also track the number of messages that are filtered by ISPs or delivered to recipients’ junk mail folders. Only 10 percent of ESPs have integrated these programs at this time, though.
As you can see, the numbers for each method would be drastically different, and in order to track your exact deliverability rate, you must know how your ESP calculates this metric as every other metric is based on this number.
It is not just deliverability that is calculated differently. ESPs also differ in the way they determine the number of emails sent. Some ESPs, like Listrak, count the number of unique email addresses the email was sent to while others count the number of attempts made to deliver the message to each address. If you sent an email to 5,000 subscribers, the number of emails sent could be 5,000, or it could be 15,000 if it took three attempts to each subscriber before the message went through. For accuracy, you should only count the number of unique email addresses your message was delivered to. However, be sure to find out which method your ESP uses because you might be charged per email send and the numbers can quickly grow out of control if you are paying to send messages two or three times.
Another major metric that causes confusion is the click-through rate. 42 percent of ESPs, including Listrak, calculate the click-through rate by dividing the number of unique subscribers that clicked on the message by the total number of emails delivered. 25 percent calculate it by dividing the number of unique subscribers that clicked on the message by the total number of subscribers that have opened the message. And another eight percent calculate it by dividing the number of unique subscribers that clicked on the message by the total number of emails that were sent. However, as we just learned, the number of emails sent and the number of emails delivered are calculated in different ways, too. Because all of these numbers are used in accordance with one another, you must know how each number is calculated in order to receive accurate results.
While it is easy to see how the numbers can quickly spiral out of control, all hope is not lost. If you are using an ESP, you can rest assured that the numbers will be calculated in the same way with each email campaign you send, which means that you will be comparing the results that were generated in the same way. You simply have to work with your ESP to learn how they calculate their results in order to achieve the most accurate data as possible.
It is also very important for you to build your own benchmarks instead of relying on industry data. If you read a report stating that the average open rate for email campaigns in your industry is 20 percent and the average click-through rate is three percent, you should not hold yourself to those standards. Not only could there be a discrepancy in the way you and the other companies are calculating results, but each company has its own way of sending emails. Some use a very targeted, dynamically-driven approach while others just send a general broadcast email to all of their subscribers at once. These different approaches garner much different results. The only way to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns is to track them against your own benchmarks, which we will discuss later in this paper.
