SparkPost Signals Promises To Help B2B Marketers Predict E-mail Campaign Performance

E-mail delivery and analytics service SparkPost on Tuesday launched SparkPost Signals, a predictive intelligence tool designed to help marketers better understand how their campaigns will perform.

The San Francisco-based firm, whose B2B clients include Adobe, SAS and SiteCore, said SparkPost Signals will offer a “Health Score” their use of e-mail that scales from zero to 100 based on historical data as well as comparisons with other customers of its cloud-based delivery service. Those that fall below the 55 mark, for example, would potentially be in danger of an outage based on their e-mails being blacklisted by customers.

SparkPost claims it sends 37 per cent of all B2B and B2C e-mail messages, which amounts to trillions of behavioural activity to draw upon and compare against a customer’s own data.

Charlie Reverte, SparkPost’s chief product officer, said any firm that sends more than 1,000 messages per day would have enough data to analyze and offer predictive intelligence through SparkPost Signals.

The “sweet spot” for SparkPost are those companies who score in the “yellow zone” of 55-80, Reverte said, which means they have areas to improve upon, like optimizing their sending list based on recipient engagement.

“People might think, ‘I have lots of KPI pressure, why would I shrink my list?’” Reverte told B2B News Network. “The problem is those senders are much more likely to be spam-foldered. If they’re not opening your e-mail after six months, maybe you can try a reengagement campaign.”

Following the launch of SparkPost Signals, Reverte said the company plans to work on tools to assist with some of those optimization strategies. It will also offer integrations with other integrations for SparkPost signals with cloud-based delivery systems other than its own.

In the meantime, SparkPost Signals also offers spam trap reporting and engagement insights such as complaints and unsubscribes from various recipients. These features can be used to help B2B marketers personalize e-mail campaigns. Specific individuals within a buying team, for instance, could be sent a message at a time based on when they’ve shown to be most likely to engage with their e-mail.

Beyond the tools themselves, Reverte suggested B2B marketers adopt a data-driven mindset at they plan their campaigns, even when it means going above and beyond things like A/B testing of subject lines.

“(A/B testing) is pretty well accepted as a best practice in the industry, but we think it’s only half the solution, because the result is you pick one winner,” he said. “That means a one-size-fits-all solution for your audience, when in reality there are people who preferred the other variant. We’d suggest looking at segmenting and personalizing your campaign to send them what they actually want.”

SparkPost Signals has already helped early adopters, which include Zillow and Cordial, drive four times higher opens and clicks, the company said.