The Email Experience Council is pushing to standardize metrics it has developed after a two-year research endeavor that included surveying dozens of email broadcast vendors.

The bottom-line reason for its call for industry-accepted metrics, it says in its blog, is that it has become impossible to compare response and deliverability rates when terms are based on different calculations.

The result of the work of its volunteer committee, Measurement Accuracy Roundtable, is a newly created and vetted list of definitions of key measures,  [pdf]. The EEC is asking for industry input with a survey on its site as well as feedback on the definitions.

Ongoing Debate

Much of this debate has been taking place in the email marketing community for some time. Almost a year ago Loren McDonald, co-chair of the EEC Measurement Accuracy Roundtable, posted his views on why the EEC wanted to see the term 'render rate' replace 'open rate at the Deliverability blog.

"The open rate has become extremely inaccurate because disabled images, use of preview panes and HTML-unfriendly mobile devices lead to an underreporting of the true number of opens," he wrote. "Fellow EEC Roundtable member Morgan Stewart has done analysis across several ExactTarget clients and estimates a typical underreporting of from 5% to 35%. Meaning a measured 30% open rate is actually from 31.5% to 40.5%."

Industry Trends

As the industry talks about new metrics it would also be helpful to consider the changes in the larger shifts taking place. In a recent Mailer Mailer Email Marketing Metrics Report [pdf], the company again noted that open rates are becoming less accurate with many people reading email from hand held devices and disabling image downloading.

"The fact that click rates remained fairly steady suggests that people are still reading the messages even though fewer opens are being reported."

Alternative Measures

There is also a case to be made for considering - if not formalizing - alternative metrics, according to a post by Chad Horenfeldt at Eloqua.

Besides the typical benchmarks such as those provided by MarketingSherpa, Horenfeldt suggested the following:

• Automated Email Metrics. "The goal is to demonstrate that key email metrics such as opens, click-throughs and conversions are much higher while unsubscribes are much lower using an automated program such as lead nurturing when compared to manual email sends (“one offs”). It would be very useful to B2B marketers to have benchmarks to track if their automated campaigns are trending upwards or downwards year after year."

• How Email Contributes Further Down the Sales/Marketing Funnel. Increasingly marketers need to prove the value of their marketing spend in even greater detail, he says. "Email opens as an example is not good enough. What we need to see is metrics such as the number of marketing touches (including email) that lead to an opportunity and/or closed deal. This data needs to go beyond the communications that marketing is sending but should combine the efforts from marketing AND sales."

• Database Accuracy Metrics. "I would like to see metrics that include the percentage completeness of contacts for key contact fields and the resulting email response metrics for campaigns that involve data that has been cleansed."

• Multi-channel Metrics. "It would be very helpful to see which channels combined with email were the most successful in certain situations."