Here at Deliverability.com, we like to leak information to the world as we get it in hopes of spurring debate and helping educate folks interested in email marketing (and obviously deliverability) in general.
As part of that, Pivotal Veracity unveiled its latest product announcement today in a special insider's meeting – the Mailbox IQ, or, as they're fond of acronyms, MIQ. In short, they'll go live tomorrow (9/9/09 – clever date based marketing) with a tool which will allow a sender to access "customer level tracking of email deliverability, rendering and
reputation across mobile, social, search and traditional web and
software-based email platforms."
Using special technology to fingerprint emails tying them back to a specific sender and their campaign, this service will tell you exactly where it landed, in what folder and via which email client. This shifts the conversation from seed testing as a predictive tool for getting a default disposition (fancy term for where the mail would land with a pristine and not customized ISP inbox) rather to a recipient performance based tool showing where the email actually landed, as PV claims.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. They claim to have several large beta clients already using this (both ESP and single sender) so now it's just a matter of seeing how the data pans out for the rest of the community.
PV MIQ Site here. And official (early) press release here.
Let us know your thoughts!
Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability, Bronto Software
Last 5 posts by Chris Wheeler
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- Deliverability Forum: It's a Wrap! - January 11th, 2010
- Cultural Bias: A Discussion Around ISP and ESP Relations - December 17th, 2009
- Future of Deliverability: A Series - November 16th, 2009
I saw the reports and the product itself today and can tell you that as a client side email marketer its pretty cool stuff. The ability to import the data into a data warehouse and use it to micro-segment is pretty incredible.
To me this opens up a new chapter in the ability for the marketer to gain visibility into their subscribers.
My only concern is how does an organization explain the data it captures from a privacy perspective. Organizations with strict privacy policies will need to carefully consider this.
Overall, I am excited to see how this rolls out.
Andrew
Great point, Andrew. Something lawyers will no doubt be all over.
Another thing is whether the numbers they come back with for disposition – will they be able to confirm 100% that they're accurate? Seed testing is just a small sample size supposed to get you an idea of email behavior at an aggregate level. Here, I'd need to know with full confidence that each and every email landed where they said it did empirically instead of just a good calculated measure of where they think it landed.
Somebody start using this and then spill the beans!
@ChrisAWheeler