In what is claimed to be a first for the industry, e-mail deliverability consultancy Pivotal Veracity is expected to announce today it has developed technology that allows marketers to track how and on what devices individual subscribers open, sort and interact with their messages.
Dubbed MailboxIQ, the technology has been in development for a year and has been in beta with clients such as American Express, Apple, Oracle, Progressive and Nestle, according to Pivotal Veracity.
Traditionally, marketers have relied on seed lists to gauge whether or not their messages were making it into people’s inboxes or being shunted off to their spam folders.
Seed lists typically consist of a dozen or so dummy addresses at e-mail ISPs the marketer deems important enough to monitor.
However, according to Pivotal Veracity CEO Deirdre Baird, seed-list information only shows how Internet service providers are generally treating marketers’ incoming messages, not what’s happening in individual subscribers’ inboxes.
“For 10 years now we’ve been tracking deliverability using seed addresses,” she said. “What our patent-pending technology allows us to do is track deliverability for your customers. Instead of having to base deliverability on a handful of seeds, you’re now able to track it on a customer level.”
Individual delivery tracking is important, she said, because whether a mailer’s messages are treated as spam or not is being increasingly determined on an individual-mailbox basis.
“Yahoo may think your e-mail is spam, but if I have replied to your e-mail or added you to my address book, you’re always going to make it into my inbox,” she said. “Likewise, if I report your e-mail as spam once, it doesn’t matter what Yahoo thinks it is. Yahoo will give precedence to the customer and your e-mail will go into my spam folder from here on out. “
She added: “While we’re tracking individual deliverability, seed lists only track—for lack of a better word—default deliverability.”
Users of MailboxIQ can tell—among other things—when individual subscribers using Web-based addresses move their messages to their junk folder or into a personal folder, and which customers add the sender to their address book, report their message as spam, and/or forward the message, according to Baird.
MailboxIQ also allows mailers to tell what types of devices recipients are using to read their messages so, for example, a sender who determines a significant portion of recipients are reading their messages on mobile devices can design them accordingly, according to Baird.
“You can learn about the individual platform [device] and client [type of e-mail account, such as Yahoo or Outlook] preferences of your individual customers from one campaign to the next,” she said. “If someone clicks on your e-mail, we can tell you where that e-mail was when they clicked on it.”
However, the recipient must interact with the message in some way in order for MailboxIQ tracking to work, she said.
