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E-mail service provider eDialog claims to have come up with a way to measure the relevance of clients’ e-mail programs.

Dubbed “The Relevance Trajectory,” eDialog’s scheme boils the concept of e-mail campaign relevancy down to six factors: segmentation, lifecycle management, triggered messages, personalization, interactivity, and testing.

The idea behind the factors is that any marketer who does all six well is sending truly relevant messages, which will invariably result in a significantly higher return on investment. However, very few are doing so.

“Generally today, most e-mail still stinks,” said John Rizzi, chief executive of eDialog. “Marketers continue to create crimes against relevancy. The consumer wants to be treated more respectfully, only wants mail that matters, yet marketers can’t stop themselves from blasting e-mails.”

Among the risks of sending irrelevant e-mails is losing customers to competitors who treat the people on their lists with more respect, he said.

eDialog’s Relevance Trajectory asks marketers to give the six factors that make up relevancy a score of zero, one, two or three—zero meaning the marketer does not use the factor, three meaning the marketer uses the factor extensively.

The company’s scheme also weights each factor according to importance. eDialog assigned segmentation a 25% weight, lifecycle management and triggered e-mails 20% each, personalization and interactivity 15% each and testing 5%.

So, for example, an e-mail program that is strong on testing and therefore gets a three in that area, but scores ones on everything else, would have a weighted score of 1.1.

eDialog executives strongly debated the various weights, said Rizzi.

“You can argue that that weighting of these factors may not be what you think is important in your business,” he said. “Fine, then change the weights. The important thing is that you use the same scale every time.”

According to eDialog, a weighted score of less than 0.5 means the company’s e-mail program is primarily broadcast.

A score of 0.5 to one indicates some relevance, but not much. A score from one to two indicates “relevance is emerging,” but that it should be easy to find areas to improve. A score of two to 2.5 means the marketer is sending largely relevant e-mail, but there is room for improvement and, 2.5 to three means the program is pretty solid from a relevancy standpoint.

eDialog’s scheme then uses a matrix to rate the complexity of a marketer’s program to assess its capabilities and determine areas that can be improved quickly.

For example, a marketer whose file contains no data other than e-mail addresses and who does not segment the file could add the relatively simple feature of “welcome” e-mails to their program to improve their relevancy score. A marketer who has sophisticated profiles of their customers and delivers custom content to different segments of their file could tackle the highly complex task of sending automated e-mails triggered by abandoned shopping carts.

Tim Maloney, director, NFL direct marketing for the National Football League gave eDialog’s Relevance Trajectory very high marks.

The challenge for e-mail marketing managers who want to implement it, however, will be overcoming corporate inertia, he said.

“Where this is going to struggle is it’s an attempt to change people’s habits in an environment where we’re all trying to get our message out there to as many people as we can for the least amount of money,” he said. “We’re going to have to change the way we do things and take time and plan ahead and other things we don’t normally do when we’re up against deadlines and budgets.”

He added: “The onus is on us to mail smarter.”