In Email an Overall Grade Tells You Little
By Ken Magill
Imagine your kid’s report card says he’s got an 82 average and you happen to know from experience that he gets 90-plus scores effortlessly. Do you stop at that 82 number, fold up the report card and put it away? Of course not. You look to see where he’s coming up short. In my son’s case this year, it was Spanish. In one quarter, he had high 90s across the board accept for in Spanish, where his grade was in the 60s. His Spanish teacher was so disconnected, kids in her class would take out their iPhones during tests to look up answers. So my kid, upset that his classmates were getting away with cheating, checked out. The wife and I explained to him that it was her class, her rules, or lack thereof, and he had no choice but to do whatever it would take to get that grade up. Marketers should think of their email reputations the same way. Yeah, that top number tells some of the story but not even close to all of it. A sender’s overall reputation might be pretty good, but email is handled differently at each of the major ISPs. A marketer whose messages are being delivered just fine at Yahoo!, AOL and Outlook might be getting hammered at Gmail. Just like the report-card example, Gmail might be irritating, but it’s Google’s house, Google’s rules. Marketers just have to work within them. And just like the report-card example, the marketer’s grades can change at individual ISPs on a rolling basis. But if marketers aren’t getting email report cards that shed light into individual ISPs on a rolling basis, they can’t know when a problem arises at a specific one that must be addressed. eDataSource recently unveiled a tool marketers can use to get individual ISP-performance information in real time and for free. Dubbed Delivery Index, the tool allows marketers to input their domains and get instant feedback on their email performance at all the major ISPs. Delivery Index covers more than 120,000 brands. Using machine learning and the behavior of a panel of more than 2.5 million people, it returns an overall score of the inputted domain’s email performance from one to 10, with anything under eight indicating the majority of the marketer’s is not getting delivered into would-be recipients’ inboxes and the marketer’s email program needs improvement. But just as in the report-card example, that overall number only tells so much. As a result, Delivery Index offers charts showing the domain’s email performance on a day-to-day, campaign-by-campaign basis at each of the major ISPs. That way a marketer who gets a needs-improvement number can see exactly where and act on it. And, yes, Delivery Index is a lead-generation tool. Click here to try it
