Email Marketing Voodoo - MindComet

Jul07

metrics, measurement, reporting, eec, standardization

The EEC Spearhead Metric Standardization

Since the inception of email marketing, professionals have struggled to come together and agree upon a means of determining metrics. Believe it or not, there have yet to be any standards put in place.

The landscape of determining email metrics have largely consisted of rogue marketers and independent states, determining their own specific way of measuring the results for their emails.

But this is all about to change. The EEC (Email Experience Council) is stepping up and facing this problem head on by proposing industry-wide standards for metrics. The EEC has created a group of leaders in the email marketing industry, dubbed the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable. The group is focusing on ESPs (Email Service Providers) to join the movement, as they are the ones who will be implementing the reporting standards in the future.

For more information on the S.A.M.E. (Support Adoption of Metrics for Email) project, visit the EEC’s site. Once there, you should review the particularly interesting Project Guide PDF. Pay close attention to the ESP Reporting Matrix in that document… Out of 10 ESPs, each determined Delivery, Opens and Clicks differently—no wonder there’s such a huge need for standardization.

I can predict that if this gets momentum on the ESP side of things, there are going to be huge changes in email marketing. New terms and definitions popping up, completely transforming the ideas of success and failure. Hopefully for the whole, the growing pains won’t take too long to leapfrog.

MindComet will be in full support of this initiative, adopting the new standards by December 2010.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 07, 2010

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Feb13

double opt-in, eec, single opt-in

Is Double Opt In Dead?

The Email Evolution Conference wrapped up just a few days ago in Scottsdale, AZ. I really wish I could’ve been there to soak up all of the rich information and keynotes they had to offer. But since I couldn’t make it, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the outcomes of some the sessions.  A whole slough of topics were covered—more specifically being opt-in standards and practices.

Now there’s always been a debate between single and double opt-in methods… There are pros and cons to both, but DOI has been the agreed standard among the majority of email marketers for some time now.  But as it turns out, DOI as the standard may be a bit outdated.

I understand why most would think this is outdated and inefficient… it’s an extra step the user has to take to receive emails from your brand. This lends itself to minor list growth, which is really never a positive thing.  The potential drop-off of DOI has the potential to be pretty high.  For example, it could fall into the spam folder.  It also has the potential to be delivered, but end up overlooked by the perspective user—forever sitting in email sign-up purgatory.

Furthermore, many spammers use “double opt in emails” as a ploy to dupe unsuspecting email addresses into signing up for services they never asked to be apart of in the first place. This of course cause ISPs to block any email that may be considered a DOI message.

But with all this, I’m not sure that this being a blanketed, core practice for everyone to follow is the best idea, as Bill McCloskey reported. This should all be done on a case-by-case basis, depending on what your campaign’s goals are!

If you’re looking to send your message to as many people as possible—no matter what their demographic or background is—then yes, by all means use single opt in.  But if deliverability is important to you and your clients, then I believe precautions need to made in order to lower your bounce rates and consequently raise your open and click-throughs.  One way this can be done is to employ the DOI method of user acquirement.  It’ll weed out inactive and invalid addresses, and you’ll have a much stronger and reliable list.

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 13, 2009

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Dec. 21, 2011 4:51 PM

@emailvoodoo