Email Engagement Index – Part 2: Sent to 1st Seen.

Yesterday I talked about this new product from Pivotal Veracity called the Email Engagement Index or EEI which basically tracks how well you are engaging your customers in email. They have a host of metrics that they look at in their reports and the first is called “Sent to 1st Seen”

Sent to 1st seen is a metric which tracks the amount of time that transpires between when you send the email and when your customer sees it for the very 1st time in their client. It is basically calculated by comparing the time stamps in the header of the email that track when you sent from the server to when the email is first seen by the customer in the list view of the customers email client. It does not require that the person click on the message, it just represents the point at which the message first appeared in their inbox.

So lets break this down using an example. Lets say you deploy and email at 3 pm Friday night to suzyuser@yahoo.com. This message is accepted by Yahoo (unless you run into delivery problems like yahoo did last week) and is available for viewing 4 minutes later. However, lets say Suzy is out on a business trip and does not log into her yahoo account till Sunday at 3 pm. Therefore, your sent to 1st seen metric would be 48 hours because it took 48 hours from the time you sent it, till the time she logged in and was able to see it.

Remember..sent to 1st seen does not mean that Suzy actually read it…..that is a different metric.

So what you ask?

Why is this metric important?

This metric is important in that if you are able to time your messages more whereby you get them “higher up” in the inbox for viewing, you increase your chances of the email to be read and not buried below a bunch of other competitor emails. Second, if you are able to gauge your sent to 1st seen benchmark data (what others in your respective industry are doing) you are able to see how your competitors are doing and adjust your strategy accordingly. If you are seeing that that your once a week email that you have sent on Wednesdays for the last year is not being seen by your customers for 72 hours and your competitors are sending their communication out on Friday and getting it seen higher in the stack, it is something for you to consider testing against sending on different days and times.

Next post will on January 5th and will talk about what I would consider to be the most important metric that PV provides in this product: “1st seen to read”.

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