• by Jess Nelson , July 14, 2016

Email marketers are expected to review open rates, click rates, spam complaints and unsubscribes, among other email metrics, but those scores only offer a piece of the puzzle. So Justin Frechette, deliverability analyst at iContact, has developed a method for measuring the health of an email marketing campaign that he says offers a complete view of performance.

Frechette calls the method SUTOR, which stands for Spam complaints + Unsubscribes To Open Rate. It measures the rate in which subscribers mark messages as spam or unsubscribe from a list and then compares that number with the overall open rate. Frechette says a low SUTOR rate indicates a more engaged and loyal group of subscribers.

Marketers leveraging analytics are three times more likely to connect revenue to campaigns, according to a recent study by the Aberdeen Group, but too many still have trouble making sense of the data. 

Alexandra del Valle, marketing manager of Femwell Group Health, an iContact customer, told Email Marketing Daily that "while we learned our overall reputation was quite good, the report card called attention to the fact that open rates were weighing down our overall grade."

After a bit of digging, del Valle discovered that old contacts not responding to the emails were to blame. It prompted marketers at the company to implement best practices and clean up the subscriber list to improve response rates.

iContact, a Cision-owned company, provides an analytics report card for customers with email quality metrics and, similar to comparable analytic services, access to traditional email scores such as clicks, opens and read rates.

Frechette says this feature is different because it factors in how a large sending base can skew the actual results of a campaign.

“Open rates, complaint rates and unsubscribe rates are three key metrics every email marketer looks at,” says Frechette. "A large denominator--a large sending base--can easily make a campaign look bad.”

Frenchette says that SUTOR can help email marketers identify why users are abandoning their email marketing newsletters, and how to solve any issues to better retain customers and prevent future negative impacts to their email lists.

“If you have a high percentage of people leaving your lists, unsubscribing or spam, that’s a telltale sign there are dangerous and troubled waters ahead in your email marketing campaign that could impact future email inbox rates with email providers, and that could potentially lead to a negative sending reputation,” says Frechette. 

SUTOR does not simply average numbers, but contains a proprietary algorithm that weights metrics per ESP, message and subscriber base. Frechette says customer feedback thus far has been positive.