Email Engagement Index – Part 3: 1st Seen to Read

In the previous 2 posts, I have been talking about some the metrics involved in Pivotal Veracity’s Email Engagement Index of which I find fascinating. This post is all about what they call “1st Seen to Read”

1st Seen to Read is the amount of time that transpires between when your customers first see your emails in their inbox and when they actually read them. First off, I think we should define what they mean by “read” them. “Read Rate” as PV calls it is basically the percentage of inbox messages that are actually read by consumers. Read rate is different from the traditional open rate that most email marketers use as a benchmark for user engagement. It looks beyond 2 critical flaws that inherently muddy up the waters of open rate as a metric.

First and foremost, traditional open rates require that images be “on” in order for them to be measured. If images are disabled, then the open rate can not be measured. PV says that read rates are measured with images on and off. Second, an open will be recorded even if a recipient spends less than 1/100th of a second on the email. PV says that their “read rate” measurement require double clicking the message to open it in the full message view or that they view/read it in the preview pane for a minimum of 5 seconds.

Now that we have defined what PV considers a “read” lets go over the example of the other day. Lets say Suzy opens up her email at 8 am and sees your email for the first time. However, Suzy is a procrastinator and decides to go to a morning meeting, lunch and then out shopping. At 2 pm, Suzy decides to read your email. In this example, the “1st Seen to Read” is 6 hours, which is the amount of time that transpired when Suzy first saw your email (8 am) and when she actually read it (2 pm).

1st Seen to Read measures how important, appealing, relevant or urgent your customers perceive your emails to be. Messages perceived to have a higher sense of urgency or relevancy will generally be read quicker than those that are perceived to be less so.

Why is this Metric Important?

This metric is important in 2 different ways. First, if you are able to compare trends in Sent to 1st Seen and 1st Seen to Read, you can determine if you content has enough appeal to your user. If both of these metrics spike up in times it could indicated that your content is less important and less urgent to your customer. Combining the 2 metrics and utilizing them and then comparing them to your specific industry (which PV does) can also see how you are benchmarking to your competitors. Second, I have read tons of questions from folks in the past on things like “What is the best day of the week to send out email?” or “What time of the day do you send out email?” and the typical response from all of the experts out there is to test, which is a great idea but sometimes if you are short staffed for time and manpower etc….testing is hard. With this type of reporting you can view trends monthly in the PV application and the testing and benchmarking against your competitors are done for you.

There are other nuances to PV’s EEI, but I am not going to go into the gory details just yet. I anticipate looking at my first round of reports in the coming weeks (as they only come out once a month) and give you a full report on what I really think about this new way of looking at things. Pivotal Veracity is on my radar these days as a force to be reckoned with in engagement metrics in email and so far, I really like what they have done to frame it and market it to me.

I welcome your comments and feedback.

Technorati Tags:
email, email marketing, deliverability, open rates, engagement rates, email engagement, pivotal veracity, email engagement index, read rate, click rate, preview panes

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