Pivotal Veracity Unveils ‘Engagement’ Index, Metrics

E-mail deliverability consultancy Pivotal Veracity is expected today to unveil a new service the company claims helps marketers measure how engaged e-mail recipients are with their campaigns.

Dubbed the E-mail Engagement Index, the new service uses data from a variety of proprietary sources, including the inbox behavior of a panel of 30,000 anonymous e-mail users built and tracked by an undisclosed third party.

According to Deirdre Baird, chief executive of Pivotal Veracity, the purpose of the index is to give marketers insight into how engaged or unengaged people are with their messages and get them working to improve their programs before there are problems, such as delivery issues.

“We want to start having a higher-level dialog with our clients,” she said.

As such, the service costs $100 monthly to Pivotal Veracity’s clients and those of e-mail service providers who use Pivotal Veracity.

“We’re pricing it as a loss-leader,” Baird said.

Similarly to the way Nielsen Online tracks Web site visits, the EEI uses its panel data to track previously untrackable metrics, such as how long after messages are sent does it take for people to log in so they can see them, how long it takes for recipients to open e-mails, and how long they spend with them.

Along with the E-mail Engagement Index, Pivotal Veracity has coined four new metrics:

*The “sent-to-first-seen” rate, which tracks on average how long it takes people to log into their accounts after the messages hit their inboxes;

*The “true inbox frequency” rate, which tracks how many of the mailers’ messages are making it into recipients inboxes after spam filtering;

*The “read rate,” which tracks the number of people who spend five or more seconds with the message;

*The “first-seen-to-read” rate, which tracks how long it takes people to read their messages once they arrive.

Currently, the relatively small size of Pivotal Veracity’s panel limits the service to large, well-known brands. However, Baird said plans are in the works to expand it.

She declined to divulge the company managing the panel. She also said no personally identifiable information changes hands.

“The first thing marketers ask is: ‘Can I get the names of those people?’ and we tell them ‘No. we only get aggregate data,’” said Baird.