Silverpop Beefs Up Reporting Capabilities

E-mail marketer Silverpop is expected to announce a new release with enhanced reporting capabilities Wednesday. Silverpop Marketer 5.0 reports delivery and response rates broken down by ISP, among other things.

The added reporting capabilities reinforce Silverpop’s position as a leading email service provider (ESP), said David Daniels, analyst for Jupiter Research, owned by the parent of this publication. “Ease of use and reporting are the two most important factors for marketers in selecting an ESP,” Daniels said, citing a soon-to-be-released January Jupiter Research study of email marketers’ preferences. “Silverpop is very easy to use. Adding reporting depth helps complete the picture.”

The added offerings will also help it catch up with other ESPs such as Bigfoot that already have these capabilities.

The new release reports the deliverability of emails broken down by ISP for the top 25 ISPs. “You can see that you got, say, a 99 percent delivery rate with MSN, but only 80 percent from America Online,” said Bill Nussey, Silverpop’s president and CEO. The reports also show how recipients responded to emails.

Silverpop has a new format for reporting clickthrough rates for email newsletters. Now, the company uses screen shots of the actual email sent, with a color-coded overlay for each link showing which links did better than others.

The new release also gives a lifetime view of subscriber lists, with information on how the list has grown (or shrunk) over time, how many people are signing up and how many are opting out. Other new capabilities include comparison of multiple mailings and detailed administration controls. A global suppression feature has been added to help marketers comply with the dictates of the CAN-SPAM act.

With deliverability a key issue for email marketers worried about CAN-SPAM compliance and other issues, Daniels said Silverpop’s enhancements should help it keep market share.

“Any of the competitive differentiators or gaps on deliverability and reporting are definitely closing. ESPs can close those gaps much more quickly…because they can quickly update their product,” said Jupiter’s Daniels. “Anything that is unique in this industry isn’t unique for very long because the competition is so fierce right now.”