S.A.M.E. Metrics, New Standards
Posted by Dave McCue on December 15th, 2010
Earlier this year, SubscriberMail was among a host of email service providers who committed to change the way we present email marketing metrics to our system users as part of the Email Experience Council’s S.A.M.E. project. These changes are set to arrive in the SubscriberMail system in December 2010, and we are excited to be one of the early adopters in this important initiative to define a set of standardized metrics among all email service providers.
The S.A.M.E. project (Support the Adoption of Metrics for Email) aims to benefit email marketers by ensuring the most clear, accurate data is presented across whichever email marketing platform they may be using. For example, ESP #1 may calculate Open Rate by including any recipient who enables images on a message, while ESP #2 may calculate Open Rate including recipients who enable images OR recipients who click a link within a message (regardless of whether or not they enable images). Even labels can be different, as ESP #1 may provide Unique Click data in reports, while ESP #2 displays Distinct Click data. This lack of standards in email metrics presents a number of issues for marketers, from confusion when analyzing the data presented in an industry research report to the difficulty of migrating from one email service provider to another.
The adoption of these standards will lead to some visible changes in the reports available to SubscriberMail users. Some changes are as simple as labeling reports differently, while others represent new calculations entirely. Here are the changes you’ll see, and why:
- The term “Delivered” has been replaced by “Accepted.” Email is either accepted or rejected by a server after being sent, and this label reflects this more accurately.
- The term “Open” — which refers to recipients who rendered images in the message — has been replaced by “Render.” This, again, is a more accurate label.
- A new metric called “Unique Confirmed Opens” will show the number of recipients who rendered images in a message OR clicked a link within a message. This is a more accurate reflection of overall recipient engagement.
- A new metric called “Average Recipient Render Rate” will look at the number of recipients who viewed a message, and how many times they each viewed that message.
[NOTE: New labels will also be applied to variations on the metric in question. For example, Opens and Open Rate are now Renders and Render Rate]
While we are confident that these changes are in the best interests of our clients—and the email marketing world in general—we also understand the importance of reporting metrics in the eyes of any marketer. We want to stress that the same data our system users have always relied on will still be available, it will simply be presented through different terminology (and in the two instances noted above, through previously unavailable calculations).
As email marketers, we must be prepared to move forward when our industry demands it. The standardization of metrics is something that has been a long time coming, and we are happy to embrace this positive change. While it might not be easy to eliminate the term “Open” from our email lexicon, it’s a necessary step in the right direction. Analyzing email metrics will make a lot more sense when we’re all speaking the same language.
