Playbook objective
The playbook’s objective are to:
- Create and implement your Everest tracking pixel.
- Learn how to use Everest to identify and track engagement trends.
- 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.
Important! Be sure you know the subscription allotments based on your service tier and plan according to your sending frequency and the size of your email database. You can find your subscription information by navigating to My Everest > Account Settings > Subscription.
- Engagement terminology
- Common engagement challenges
- How monitoring engagement fits into your process
- Important engagement metrics and where to find them
- Create and implement your Everest tracking pixel
- How to use Everest to identify and track engagement trends
- What to do next
- Recipients: The number of subscribers receiving email with your tracking pixel.
- Avg read time: The average time taken to read your email in number of seconds across all recipients.
- Opens collected: The total number of unique opens excluding image proxies that inflate or distort open counts due to pre-fetching content.
- Unique opens: The total number of opens per unique email address.
- Proxy opens: The total number of proxy opens.
- Print: The total number of times a recipient printed an email.
- Forward: The total number of times a recipient forwarded an email.
- Glanced: The recipient took less than 2 seconds to read your email.
- Skimmed: The recipient took 2-7 seconds to read your email.
- Read: The recipient took 8 seconds or more to read your email.
Common challenges associated with poor engagement are:
- We have limited visibility into engagement trend tracking.
- Subscribers open our email, but our click rates are less than expected.
- We want to easily organize engagement metrics across multiple brands and mail streams.
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 subscriber list using Everest’s List Validation
- Test campaign design using Everest’s Design & Content
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 to understand the impact to your deliverability.
- Monitor DMARC compliance to identify unauthorized use of your domain and brand using Everest’s Infrastructure feature.
Engagement data is visible in the Monitoring>Engagement feature within Everest. Implementing the Everest tracking pixel and integrating your ESP or sending platform data is required.
- Recipients: Know how many recipients are generating the engagement data.
- Avg read time: Content should be skimmable and easily consumed. Short read times may indicate an issue with your design or content.
- Opens collected: Opens may vary across email providers depending on how they treat engagement pixels and if they use image proxies.
- Proxy opens: Reflects opens by mail clients using image or privacy proxies.
- Print: An increase in prints may indicate increased interest and use of your content. Subscribers may print out maps, in-store coupon codes, travel or reservation confirmations, receipts, and invoices.
- Forward: An increase in forwarded email may indicate increased interest in your content. Subscribers may forward email to friends and family if they think it is an interest or benefit to them.
- Unique opens: Compare with “Opens” to understand if there are repetitive subscriber interactions with your email.
- Glanced: Subscribers are less interested in reading your content.
- Skimmed: Subscribers are generally interested in reading your content.
- Read: Subscribers are interested in reading your content.
Use the advanced setup guide for detailed instructions on creating and implementing your tracking pixel. We recommend starting with one marketing mail pixel, but you can create as many as you want for your specific business need.
If you already created and implemented an Everest tracking pixel, proceed to the next section to start identifying trends.
1. Login to Everest
2. Navigate to Monitoring>Engagement
3. Select your Data Source.
- Select the Pixel name you entered during the pixel setup process.
- If you set up multiple pixels for different brands or business units, each pixel name is listed.
- In order to see pixel data populating in Everest, successfully inserting the pixel code into your email content and sending an email containing the pixel code to your subscribers is required. Pixel data is populated in Everest only when subscribers open and interact with email containing the pixel code.
4. Locate your Recent Activity tile to view Opens Collected, Proxy Opens, Avg. Opens, and Unique Opens.
5. Look for short-term trends, longer-term trends, and metric outliers over the past 30 days.
- Check for campaigns sent on around the same time frame of the identified trend. Subscribers don’t necessarily view their mailbox every day, so it may take days for data to appear.
- Lower engagement rates may correlate to weekend activity or pauses between campaigns.
- Check your seed list results in Everest’s Inbox Placement feature for campaigns sent on or around the trend dates to identify deliverability trends. A campaign with low inbox placement often has lower engagement rates.
Examples:
Short-term trend
Longer-term trend
- Change your date range to the past 90 days
Outliers
6. Locate your Platform Distribution tile to view audience activity by mail client or device.
- Click the details arrow to export a list of recipients.
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The recipient lists may indicate valid recipients, opens, geolocation, device and possible false positives due to content scanners or bots.
- This is valuable for identifying valid recipients and for filling possible data gaps due to proxy use by mail clients such as Apple.
- Track mail client and device audience percentage trends over time and use the Platform Distribution data along with Everest's Design & Content feature to ensure your email designs are optimized for all recipients.
7. Locate your Audience Explorer tile and click the Enthusiasm tab to view your Glanced, Skimmed and Read %.
- Check subscriber enthusiasm frequently as it can indicate a potential problem with your content strategy.
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Given your industry, business model, content objectives and audience, do you expect subscribers to spend more or less time reading your content?
- Monitor the percentages over time as you use Everest to see what is average for your business. Look for changes in the percentages over time.
- If you have high open rates and low click rates, Everest’s Enthusiasm gauge may indicate your content or offers are not meeting subscriber expectations.
- Adjust the date range filter to help identify problem areas and to track progress as you improve your email program.
1. Start tracking engagement trends after each campaign and proceed to the intermediate engagement playbook to create your improvement plan.
2. Continue reading our other Everest playbooks to help take your email marketing program to the next level.
