Nog niet alle e-mailmarketing is the SAME

Graag meer van hetzelfde als het gaat om email marketing statistieken

Dit jaar is in de Nationale e-mail Benchmark gebruik gemaakt van de email marketing definities opgesteld in het SAME project. Standaard definities om e-mailmarketing statistieken overal hetzelfde te rapporteren en ze op die manier ook vergelijkbaar te maken.

Nu beginnen ook de Nederlandse Email Service Providers deze internationale standaard voor e-mail statistieken langzaamaan te gebruiken. Met de nadruk op langzaam. Dit zouden er meer moeten zijn, en liever vandaag dan morgen. Ik sprak met Luke Glasner die vanaf 2008 het Support the Adoption of Metrics for Email – project leidt, wat afgekort, puur toevallig, SAME (hetzelfde) heet.

Belangrijke elementen van de SAME standaard

“Two aspects of the project that I personally felt where very important and really tried to push were that we would really listen to marketers to accurately represent their needs and that the standard would be global. The later aspect there was important to me because the DMA is global, email is global and so the standards also need to be global. In regards to the first aspect, we did have a very long public comments period and we took their suggestions seriously.

At first, I was a bit critical of some of the criticism, but I did give it thought about it and we did adopt some of the changes that I initially railed against. The idea behind the standards is that they foster growth and learning across industries or job functions for all email marketers and for me, they fostered growth on a personal level as well, thanks to support of many of.”

Adoptie van de standaard door ESPs

“When we announced the standards the Team was contacted by marketers and ESPs from around the world including Australia, Brazil, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Israel, Italy, Latvia, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and more. Interest and support for standardization of email metrics is truly Global, and I for one have pushed for involvement from the international community.

Our most recent adopter is Web Power from the Netherlands, who completed adoption in June. Other companies working on implementing currently are Ongage in Israel, eCircle in the United Kingdom, Tripolis in Romania. Our current adopters are primarily from the United States including All Web Email, Elite Email, Email Transmit, Responsys, SmartSource and SubscriberMail in the United States plus Mailigen based in Italy. Many of these companies have offices in multiple markets both in the US and abroad. “

De lastigste punten in de realisatie van de standaard

“Perhaps the toughest metric to crack was the open rate. There are so many nuances in how it works so many factors that affect whether that tracking pixel downloads or not. Remember back in 2007 when this all started, image blocking had just become the default for many email clients.

Prior to that, tracking pixels probably were more accurate in telling the true number of emails opened because images showed automatically until the early 2000s when coded correctly. Plus there are challenges about different types of email clients and how they handled code, support for MIME formats, etc.

At the time, desktop clients – primarily Outlook, were the most popular program battling with webmail clients and mobile clients and devices were just beginning. IPhone had just come out and was not a major trend yet while blackberry was perhaps the most popular mobile email device, finally Android did not even exist yet. So thinking through all the scenarios was tough even with the expertise we had on the round table. Ironically, one of the toughest parts was to decide the metrics names. We debated probably longer about those than how to calculate them. “

Rol van Luke Glasner

“I lead the project since 2008 with John, my co-chair. As the co-chair, I wrote most of the blog posts about the project along with the majority of the writing and editing of the SAME Guide. Once we announced the standards, I lead the audits for all but one of the adopters.

I have done a lot of outreach to the community, speaking with literally hundreds, probably thousands of marketers in the field pushing the SAME standards along with more than 50 ESPs. Overall, I have found a lot of support for the standards, while not everyone agreed with the definitions every marketer I have spoken with does agree with need for standardization.”

SAME statistieken, de definitie van uniform rapporteren

Het heeft enorm veel werkt gekost om de definities van de SAME statistieken op te stellen, maar uniforme manier van rapporteren is dan ook zeer belangrijk. Met gebruik van de SAME statistieken wordt veel verwarring weggenomen. Tevens wordt het mogelijk om statistieken tussen ESPs, maar ook van cases, rapportages en verschillende landen goed te vergelijken. Dus nu is het

Je vindt hier een Nederlandse vertaling van de definities van de SAME e-mailmarketing statistieken, net als de originele SAME statistieken.

Afbeelding: VividBreeze (cc)