At the first glance all email marketing metrics seem relatively straight forward. However it is important to know how they are calculated from the technical point of view in order to be able to analyze your campaign performance and draw any conclusions. This post describes a few basic, but often misrepresented email marketing metrics.

Bounced – email addresses that were rejected by the recipient’s server.

Delivered/Accepted – term widely used across the industry referring to the email addresses that have not bounced (were not rejected). In simple terms: Delivered = Sent – Bounced. “Delivered” is being actively challenged by a number of organizations, as it is misleading. If an email has not “Bounced” it does not necessarily mean that the email has been delivered into the recipient’s inbox. S.A.M.E. activists trying to persuade email marketers to use the term “Accepted” instead.

Inbox Placement [rate] – relatively new term in the industry. Inbox Placement Rate indicates what percentage of the email addresses have potentially been delivered into the recipients inboxes. The reason why I say potentially is because there is no way of indicating how many emails have been placed in recipients’ inboxes. The inbox placement rate is estimated by seeding the email audience with email addresses from various ISPs and email addresses protected under a selection of SPAM filters. After the campaign is deployed, these email addresses are then automatically checked to see if the email has reached the inbox. The percentage of all seed email addresses that reached the inbox is called Inbox Placement Rate.

Knowing your Inbox Placement Rate at the time when you deployed the campaign is a handy resource to have, as it will help you identifying any potential ISP issues or when analyzing the campaign performance. However these figures should never be reflected upon as true representation of how many email addresses have received your email straight into their inboxes.

Open [rate] – indicates that an email has been opened. Technically there is no way of identifying every single email that has been opened, therefore Opens are only tracked when the images are downloaded. Yes, this does mean that the real rate of emails opened is fractionally higher than you see in your campaign report.

It is important to note that different ESPs calculate their Open and click through rates differently. If you are not sure how your Open rate and Click through rate is calculated – simply ask your provider. (The ESP Reporting Matrix. Page 11-12)

Further reading

S.A.M.E. by eec
Email Marketers’ Misleading Metrics Count Email in Spam Folders as Delivered
Email Marketing Reports