Pivotal Veracity has announced a new tool for use by its current subscription members.  It sounds like another nifty service allowing marketers to get better insight into how their email is performing at participating ISPs.  Now, if only they'd make the solution available to everyone.

From their press release:

"PIVOTAL VERACITY UNVEILS THE 1st EVER EMAIL ENGAGEMENT INDEX
The only industry wide measure of email relevance based on real
customer behavior!

Phoenix, AZ – December 2, 2008 – Pivotal Veracity, the industry leader
in cross-platform email deliverability and optimization solutions announced today the unveiling of the first ever cross-industry Email Engagement Index© (EEI). The EEI is a comprehensive report of never before tracked metrics that give marketers a first-hand view into the inbox and how well they are engaging customers. Some of the new insights include: how much time transpires between when they send their email and when their customer logs in and sees it for the first time, how many of their customers actually read their emails with images both on and off, what percent are using the preview pane versus full-message view to read them and a lot more! The EEI also ranks each mailer so they can easily see how their performance rates relative to other mailers and provides benchmark data so the mailer can compare metrics such as "true" inbox frequency to others in their industry over time.

"We are an industry rife with metrics – opens, conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, etc – but they all measure the end-result, not the conditions that may have caused them," said Deirdre Baird, President,
Pivotal Veracity. "Before the EEI, we could measure spam complaint rates but we couldn't answer 'Why are my spam complaint rates going up?'; we could measure clicks but we couldn't answer 'Why are they going down?'. To answer these questions, we needed to take a step back and gauge holistically and strategically how we are engaging our customers and, we needed a way to do so mathematically, over time, and relative to others because, after all, no mailer is alone in the inbox. That is where the EEI comes in."

New Insights for Today's Challenges In addition to being the only industry-wide standardized score for engagement, the EEI introduces a set of new critical metrics that allow mailers to improve their performance by understanding if and how well they are engaging customers. Such as:

The Right Message at the Right Time with "Sent to 1st Seen" – A mailer sends a special sale announcement to customers on Monday; unfortunately 200f their customers only access their email accounts on weekends. How fresh is the content seen by this mailer's customers? Not very. Sent to 1st Seen allows mailers to determine whether they are sending emails at the right time and to alter when and what they are mailing. Deliverability and Contact Frequency with "True Inbox Frequency" – How many emails are truly making it to each customer after *all* levels of filtering? The EEI allows mailers to track how many inbox emails each customer is actually seeing and how this changes from one day of the week to the next as well as relative to other mailers. Are customers more likely to pay attention to your mail on a day when there are dozens of other retail offers sitting in their inbox or on a day when
your mail is one of the few? Interest and Appeal with "Read Rate"– Open Rates are flawed and have been for some time. They can only be measured when images are on (which artificially deflates the metric ) and register a hit even when the customer only clicked on the email 1/10th of one second in order to delete it (which artificially inflates it). Read Rate measures true interest by only counting those customers who spend at least 5 seconds or more on the email and is measured with images both on and off. Urgency and Priority with "1st Seen to Read" – On Monday mornings a business customer may have dozens and dozens of emails in their inbox. Now that they've seen it, how important is it to them? Do they open it right away or wait another 5 hours? 1st Seen to Read gives mailers never before tracked insight into how customers are prioritizing their emails relative to others and allows them to gauge the effectiveness of subject lines and content by day of week. "With the ever increasing volumes of mail in the inbox today's marketers are faced with the enormous challenge of figuring out how to stay relevant in the minds and eyes of their customers. Succeed - and your clicks and conversions go up. Fail - and your unsubscribes and spam complaints do thereby preventing all future communications. The EEI is the boldest step yet to help marketers address this challenge", said Michelle Eichner, VP Client Services, Pivotal Veracity.

Accessing the EEI The EEI is computed each month across thousands of mailers using multiple proprietary data sources. The results are provided to each registered mailer in a multi-page report that details their own performance as well trends across critical industry benchmarks. The only requirement for participation is that a mailer be using an authenticated (SPF, SID, DK/DKIM) from domain in their mailings. No tracking or any other special setup is required by mailers other than registration for receipt of reports. To ensure universal availability to mailers, the EEI is available exclusively from Pivotal Veracity and Pivotal Veracity's agency and ESP partners.
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-Chris Wheeler

Datran Media

Comments

The EEI is available to mailers who are PV clients directly from Pivotal Veracity. Additionally, mailers may also access the EEI through over 50 ESPs and Agencies who are PV partners.