In 2010, the Email Experience Council (eec) established a project called Support the Adoption of Metrics for Email or S.A.M.E. It’s both an acronym and the goal of their project. Prior to the project, Email Service Providers (ESPs) had no uniform way to report, define or calculate metrics for email marketing campaigns.
As a result of their efforts, legitimate ESPs now have a standard to use and the eec actually audits and certifies that you’re in compliance. This brings stability to the industry and ensures marketers, no matter which ESP they’re using, can better understand email results.
Today I want to focus on one of those terms that seems to cause the most confusion: Unique Confirmed Opens. What is an open? What makes it confirmed? How does it differ from a “Render” or what used be called an “Open”?
When email campaigns deploy, the ESP is sending a multi-part message that is a text file containing the required message headers, the HTML version’s code and a text version (for the rare number of people using email clients that don’t support HTML). In order to report anything, the recipient needs to open the HTML version and do something with it: view images and/or click links.
In the past, most ESPs reported image loading as an “Open” and click activity was tracked/reported separately. As you’re well aware, many email clients have images turned off by default. If you design your emails properly, per best practices, to appear and function well without images (i.e., using a lot of text and links with images as support for the text), a person could open and click without viewing images.
With that scenario, under the old “rules” they would show up as a clicker but not an opener because they only clicked on links. The goal of S.A.M.E. was to increase the reliability of knowing who had eyes on your marketing campaign. If someone clicks a link they obviously opened it. Thus, the Unique Confirmed Open metric was instituted.
Old way:
VIEWED IMAGES = OPENED
CLICKED LINKS = CLICKED
S.A.M.E. way:
(VIEWED IMAGES and/or CLICKED LINKS) [Deduped] = Unique Confirmed Opens
VIEWED IMAGES = RENDERED (as in you rendered the images to make them appear, only looks at the rate at which people who received the email loaded images)
CLICKED LINKS = Unique Clickers used to calculate the Unique Click Rate (only looks at the rate at which people who received the email clicked on something)
The eec notes, and we want to reiterate, that no method is 100% perfect. All metrics are a best estimate of activity in a campaign. Due to the variances in mail servers, firewall, email clients and browsers, what’s communicated back to a sender is never flawless. Hence, your reporting is always a best possible guide to activity for a specific campaign.
In the end, you now have a clearer way to read, understand and analyze your reporting metrics for email marketing campaigns. Over time, it will allow you, or your strategic partner(s), to assist you in planning testing and future campaign directions.
References:
S.A.M.E. Project
http://www.emailexperience.org/eec-projects/member-roundtables/support-adoption-of-metrics-for-email-project
S.A.M.E. metrics definitions
http://redpillemail.com/eec/standardizedmetrics.pdf
