Subscriber Engagement: Top Apparel Brands Pulling Away From the Field

Customers go further for the brands that truly inspire them. In email, that means not merely reading their favorite brands’ messages, but searching the spam folder when they can't find them. Among top apparel retailers, Abercrombie & Fitch and J.Crew distance themselves from the rest in these as well as other measurements of subscriber engagement.

To compare apparel retailers’ email programs, Return Path examined a year's worth of engagement data across Internet Retailer's Hot 100 E-Retailers of 2013, including 43 brands in the analysis. We looked at how much of each sender's email was read, deleted without reading, delivered to the spam folder, complained about (this is spam, or TIS), and rescued from the spam folder (this is not spam, or TINS), and we calculated each brand's average Sender Score (a measure of sending reputation) for 52 weeks ending in early August. The difference between the winners and everyone else was striking.

The Winners
Abercrombie & Fitch had the highest average read rate and Sender Score of the group, and managed to score in the top five in every metric we measured. J.Crew achieved the highest TINS rate, and only barely trailed Abercrombie in read rate and Sender Score. Compared to the rest of the group, these two brands’ messages were read more than twice as frequently and their Sender Scores were twice as high.

Comparing the blended averages of the top four brands to the bottom four, and to the other 35 senders in the group, presents a consistent picture of high performers pulling away from the field while low performers falling far behind. The combined average Sender Score for the top four (96) placed them comfortably ahead of the middle (86) and vastly ahead of the bottom four (54). The best senders’ messages were read 77 percent more frequently than the middle group's and 240 percent more frequently than the bottom four's messages. The top group's messages were more than 10 times as likely to be rescued from the spam folder than the bottom four's.

The Losers
The four worst-performing senders are clearly not taking full advantage of email to create meaningful interactions with their customers. Compared to the top four, their messages were nearly 19 times more likely to be delivered to the spam folder and 82 times more likely to draw complaints. And while their subscribers had ample opportunities to rescue their messages from the spam folder, they rarely did: it happened in only 0.4 percent of cases.

Most senders struggled to reach subscribers’ inboxes at some point during the year, but deliverability wasn't the defining difference between the winners and losers. Engagement was. Getting to the inbox is necessary to initiate a relationship, but engagement is what keeps the relationship from fizzling out. Abercrombie & Fitch and J.Crew are using email to keep their customers committed to real relationships. To follow their lead, you need to measure and constantly improve your subscriber engagement. Your email program performance metrics will rise, but more important, your customers will develop real loyalty that extends across every channel.

What the Metrics Mean

• Read rate: the percentage of messages read compared to all messages sent
• Spam rate: the percentage of messages delivered to the spam folder compared to all messages sent
• TIS rate: the percentage of email delivered to the inbox that drew complaints (this is spam)
• TINS rate: the percentage of messages rescued from the spam folder (this is not spam)
• Delete without reading rate: the percentage of ignored emails (i.e., deleted without being read)
• Sender Score: a proxy for mailbox providers’ evaluation of a sender's reputation, represented on a scale from one to 100

Tom Sather is the senior director of research at Return Path, an email marketing solution that helps to improve deliverability and ROI.