June 30th, 2009
"One of the largest problems facing email marketers today is the lack of industry standards for email metrics. One such much maligned measurement is the open rate. To help fellow email marketers, the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable was formed by service providers and other industry members of the Email Experience Council (eec). For the past several months, we have been working on finding a way to solve this problem, working specifically with the open metric. We have developed a group of definitions and standards to develop a new, better metric, the Render Rate. Through a lot of participation and hard work, the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable come up with what we believe is a clear and consistent definition, but we need the participation of one more person - YOU - our industry colleagues"...read on
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I'm still on the fence about this render rate. By definition it does make more literal sense as people opening the email do not always load the images, some people who click do not always load the images but that is still an open. what we can track is people who load the images and people who click links - the wild card for reporting is people who hit the "View in a Browser" link as they are not clicking through to the call(s) to action but they are clicking and that page that loads will have the images loaded - is that a render or a click or both but neither?
Everyone I talk to just wants to know how many people opened the email so they know how good their subject line is and how many people clicked so they know how good their content is - with or without images.
"One of the largest problems facing email marketers today is the lack of industry standards for email metrics. One such much maligned measurement is the open rate. To help fellow email marketers, the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable was formed by service providers and other industry members of the Email Experience Council (eec). For the past several months, we have been working on finding a way to solve this problem, working specifically with the open metric. We have developed a group of definitions and standards to develop a new, better metric, the Render Rate. Through a lot of participation and hard work, the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable come up with what we believe is a clear and consistent definition, but we need the participation of one more person - YOU - our industry colleagues"...read on
- - -
I'm still on the fence about this render rate. By definition it does make more literal sense as people opening the email do not always load the images, some people who click do not always load the images but that is still an open. what we can track is people who load the images and people who click links - the wild card for reporting is people who hit the "View in a Browser" link as they are not clicking through to the call(s) to action but they are clicking and that page that loads will have the images loaded - is that a render or a click or both but neither?
Everyone I talk to just wants to know how many people opened the email so they know how good their subject line is and how many people clicked so they know how good their content is - with or without images.
