Everest Engagement Playbook: Advanced

• If you are a new Everest customer with no prior relationship with Validity, complete onboarding to ensure you are familiar with navigating and using Everest.   
• Complete the following setup guides. Setting up the tracking pixel and ESP integration is required to access delivery and engagement data. 
  • Everest Basic Set Up Guide
  • Everest Advanced Setup Guide 3: Engagement (Tracking Pixel, ESP Integration)  

Important! Be sure you know the subscription allotments based on your service tier. You can find your subscription information by navigating to My Everest > Account Settings > Subscription. 

• Common engagement challenges 
• How monitoring engagement fits into your process 
• Putting your engagement improvement plan in motion
• Create custom properties for your pixels
• Make a connection between your pixel and ESP data
• What to do next 

Common challenges associated with engagement are: 

• We want more detailed engagement trend tracking for our different brands and mail streams.
• We want to use our ESP engagement data more to help identify and troubleshoot deliverability issues.

Monitoring engagement helps you identify problems associated with: 

• Flat or decreasing open and click rates 

A traditional email marketing process consists of three phases: Pre-Send, In-Flight, and Monitoring. Using Engagement monitoring helps you identify engagement trends and gather insights across multiple data points. 

Pre-send 

• Inform your email campaign strategy with Everest’s Competitive Intelligence 
• Plan campaign 
• Select target subscriber list  
• Design campaign 
• Validate target subscriber list using Everest’s List Validation feature
• Test campaign design using Everest’s Design & Content feature

In-Flight 

• Send campaign to subscribers and the Everest seed list 
• View your campaign’s inbox placement, spam, and missing results using Everest’s Inbox Placement 

Monitoring 

• Monitor engagement metrics using Everest’s Engagement feature, your ESP, or internal sending platform. 
• Monitor sending reputation metrics using Everest’s Monitoring feature to understand the impact to your deliverability. 
• Monitor DMARC compliance to identify unauthorized use of your domain and brand using Everest’s Infrastructure feature. 

In the intermediate playbook, you created an engagement improvement plan. As you work through your plan, be sure to enhance the data insights by creating and using custom pixel properties and integrating your ESP data with Everest.

Using these additional data points, along with Everest's other features such as Inbox Placement and Sending Reputation helps give a more complete picture about your sending performance and how everything works together to help you meet your goals.

Custom properties are important attributes related to your business to help provide additional insights into campaign performance. Those properties could be for gender, age group, industry, political affiliation, and more. Custom properties are especially valuable for informing decisions related to content personalization and relevancy, which is a focus for many marketers seeking to improve engagement.

Important! Prior to creating your Pixel's custom properties, contact your ESP to find out the correct formatting and merge field names for the different attributes you wish to track. Each ESP is different, so errors in the formatting or field names will cause the pixel to not work properly. If you use your own sending platform, contact your email administrator to get the correct field names and formatting for your specific sending platform. 

1. Login to Everest 

2. Navigate to My Everest: Engagement 

3. Click Analytics Settings 

4. Click the Custom Properties tab 

5. Click New Property 

6. Enter the custom property name. For example: 

• Age 
• account_ID 

Note: To ensure proper filtering results in Everest, please do not use a hyphen (-) in your custom property name. If you want to add a country or region custom property, use names such as "market", "marketregion", "territory", "province", and "location".

7. Enter the description of what the custom property is tracking. For example: 

• Age groups: 18-24, 25-64, 65+ 

8. Enter the token or merge tag name of the custom property.

• Don't forget to get the correct formatting from your ESP or email administrator.

For example: 

• {{Age}} or {{account_ID}} 
• If you are waiting for the field name and formatting from your ESP or email administrator, you can put in a placeholder value and change it later. 

9. Click Save 

10. Repeat steps 5-9 for each custom property.

11. On the Custom Properties grid, locate your custom property in the Parameter column

12. Toggle the Visible switch *on* for each custom property to ensure you can view metrics in Everest. 

Insert Custom Properties into your tracking pixel code 

1. Login to Everest 

2. Navigate to Monitoring>Engagement 

3. Click Analytics Settings 

4. Click Tracking Code for your existing pixel 

• Your pixel details are visible, including your ESP

5. Select Include under Include Custom Properties 

• In the text field on the right, a highlighted "&" symbol appears with the custom property field name. 
• If you used a placeholder value, be sure to contact your ESP for correct formatting or your pixel won’t work! 

6. When you know the custom properties have the correct formatting and field names, click Copy Tracking Code and add the code to all applicable email templates. 

• Be sure to use the correct pixel code for each brand, list segment, or mail stream.  

7. Repeat steps 4-6 for each tracking pixel you wish to implement with custom properties. 

Analyze data for your multiple pixels and custom properties

After you implement your tracking pixels with custom properties and are using them in your email templates, perform short and long-term analysis of the results by changing the filter options. 

Perform a trend analysis for:

• Data source: Aggregate tracking pixel data, then by the marketing and transactional pixels or other specific tracking pixels
• Mailbox Provider: Your top 5 mailbox providers 
• Date range: 7, 30, and 90 days
• Custom Properties: your defined custom properties
  • In the Filter section, click Add Filter and select Custom Property

1. Login to Everest 

2. Navigate to Monitoring>Engagement 

3. Click Delivery Insights and review the results tiles for important trends.

• By default, Everest displays aggregate data. Change your data sources and Mailbox providers as needed in the Filters section.
  • Click Add Filter to filter by your Custom Properties

4. Locate the Recent Activity widget and look for any short or long-term trends

• Compare the dates in the results grid to your campaigns to see if there are any correlations

5. Locate the Delivery Issues widget and click through each tab for insights on Mailbox Providers, IP addresses, and non-deliveries.

• Look for patterns to help identify potential problem areas contributing to poor deliverability and engagement.

If you see any unexpected delivery and engagement data, check your inbox placement and sending reputation data in Everest to see if there are any associated deliverability problems.

1. Incorporate your pixel and ESP data analysis into your daily routine to identify problems and improvement opportunities.

2. Add additional custom pixel properties if needed over time as you learn which data elements provide the most actionable insights.

3. Continue reading our other Everest playbooks to help take your email marketing program to the next level.

• Everest Playbooks