DMdelivery v8.7 introduces S.A.M.E. metrics for email
28-03-2012DMdelivery 8.7 implements S.A.M.E. metrics for email as defined in 2010 by the Email Experience Council. S.A.M.E. is the abbreviation for Support the Adoption of Metrics for Email.
The S.A.M.E. metrics are an addition to DMdelivery and not replacing the standard metrics in DMdelivery. So don’t worry if you still want to use the statistics as you used to do, they are still there!
Why are we implementing the S.A.M.E. metrics?
There is a lack of consistent and unified standards for the most basic email metrics, such as delivered, opened and clicked. This lack of standards leads to two major problems for email marketers trying to improve upon their email programs:
- A lack of standards makes benchmarking upon a clear apples-to-apples comparison practically impossible.
- When email marketers migrate from one vendor or system to another, they often find the methods of calculating key metrics differ from one system to another.
The email experience council defined a consistent and unified standard for email metrics, that email marketers and service providers can embrace.
What has notably changed?
Not that much actually! Our statistics were very compatible with the S.A.M.E. project metrics. So using the new metrics from now on should not be a huge step to take. Most statistics are pretty much the same as they used to be. We pick out two changes that might need some explanation.
Accepted
Accepted is a delivery metric that you know from our current statistics as ‘total emails delivered’. The term accepted literally means an email that is accepted by the receiving email server. It doesn’t matter where the actual email ends up (even the spam folder), as long as the receiving server does not give a bounce reply (either hard bounce or soft bounce).
Email Render Rate
One interesting definition in the S.A.M.E. project metrics is the Email Render Rate. This definition is different from the Email Open Rate in one particular way: The Email Render Rate only counts the times a user has downloaded the images in an email. When a person clicks a link inside the email without having downloaded the images first, it does not count as an Email Render.
Further reading
For all the other definitions and explanations of the S.A.M.E. project metrics, look at our DMdelivery 8.7 changelog, which you can find at the home screen of your DMdelivery account, or check out the extensive S.A.M.E. project Guide (PDF) by The Email Experience Council.