Direct Marketing Association

The Email Experience Council (eec) is the email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association and its members are professionals that represent trade organizations, agencies, advertisers, technology partners and others that focus on electronic marketing. Its founding came about for a few reasons, but mostly because email is largely unregulated when it comes to marketing. The council believes this lack of regulation has allowed what they term “unscrupulous marketers” to abuse email.

A function of the ecc is its member roundtables, which set standards and seek initiatives pertinent to email marketing and communications practices. One issue it recently tackled is measuring email campaigns. Email marketing success has traditionally been driven by measurement, however the metrics used have not been standardized across the industry.

“Industry standard metrics is so foundational that many marketers don’t even think to ask if an open is always an open or if delivered doesn’t mean reaching the inbox,” says eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable vice-chair and Return Path, Inc. VP of Global Market Development Stephanie Miller.

The Measurement Accuracy Roundtable worked to create standardized metrics for industry adoption. The two-year effort ended in March, when the eec introduced eight email marketing measurement standards that it hopes marketers will adopt.

As of late last month, just two vendors (AllWebEmail and Email Transmit) have actually adopted the standards, but the ecc notes that 11 others have promised to implement the standards in the coming six months.

“I believe in this standard because it provides four main benefits to the email marketers. It improves testing validity by limiting environmental variance, improves industry benchmarking through increased data conformity, improves internal reporting for benchmarking by easing the transition between vendors and finally use of the standards will normalize data across the industry, a key assumption required for any statistical analysis”, said eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable co-chair Luke Glasner of Glasner Consulting.

The new measurement standards include eight definitions for reporting on Accepted, Render and Click-through. In the past, not only were multiple names and terms used that confused some marketers, but also different vendors used different calculations for the same terms.

Project co-chair John Caldwell of Red Pill Email believes, “The email industry has long been without measurement standards, using terms and definitions that make it impossible to benchmark properly or compare vendor performance with confidence. The good work of our volunteer eec member committee is the first time the industry has rallied around a common set of measurement standards.” 

Organizations that adopt and conform to the eec’s email marketing measurement standards will be given an official seal to display on the company’s Web site. Those interested in participating will find an application on the ecc site.

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Eye on Messaging is written by Stephanie Jordan, editor in chief of Messaging News. If you have story ideas or news to share, email her: sjordan [at] messagingnews [dot] com