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Q4
CAPITAL MARKETS ENGAGEMENT IN CONTXT
Q4 - 2018
A LETTER FROM OUR HEAD OF PRODUCT
Q4 - 2018 - QUARTERLY BENCHMARK REPORT
At Street Contxt, we spend a lot of time thinking about how firms can leverage client
email engagement to drive deeper relationships with clients, personalize the
experience, and cover more clients efficiently.
As we close off 2018, we wanted to take a look not only at Q4 benchmarks, but dig into
some of the trends that emerged throughout the year. This report will explore these
trends in more detail, but we wanted to provide a brief summary of our findings.
While we saw a significant drop in overall engagement towards the end of 2018, it’s
important to note that several firms, including those that cover a large number of
contacts per salesperson (or other client coverage role), beat the benchmark by a huge
spread. This is especially true when it comes to click rate. The best firms are paying
attention to the end user experience and results, measuring the impact of their
content, and making changes to content structure and layout by using Street Contxt.
Are your clients constantly being asked to log in to a portal when they click a link? Do
they receive too many emails from your firm every day? Are you redistributing your top
clicked and most engaged links to clients who may not have seen them? Putting the
client’s experience at the centre of your content strategy is key to beating the
benchmarks.
In a few areas of this report we dive into how false engagement data is causing
massive issues for firms, including: inaccurate reporting, incorrect calls, and incorrect
inferences of interest. Tracking email read times, for example, has become critical to
understanding whether a client has truly engaged with your email or simply opened it
while in the process of cleaning out their inbox. Driving value-add actions based on
A LETTER FROM OUR HEAD OF PRODUCT
Q4 - 2018 - QUARTERLY BENCHMARK REPORT
client data requires best-in-class analytics, and not simple and often incorrect data
points like “opened” or “did not open”. You want to be able to measure the depth of
engagement too. Are you using the equivalent of a website hit counter to measure
client engagement?
We love the opportunity to work with our clients and help them build their client
engagement strategy. It’s inspiring to work with forward thinking firms to provide
reports and client data to drive actionable insights not just for individual users and the
clients they cover, but to help drive powerful insights to managers and executives, and
the overall firm strategy.
As always, we look forward to talking soon, and hope you find this report valuable.
Joel Koroniak
Head of Product, Street Contxt
01 — INTRODUCTION
Q4 - 2018 - QUARTERLY BENCHMARK REPORT
Report Methodology
Each quarter, Street Contxt leverages anonymized pattern data from over
70,000,000 total email interactions to create this Quarterly Benchmark Report.
We hope that this quarterly report serves as a guide to understanding how your
firm should be adapting their strategy and structure to fit the always-changing
industry landscape.
How can I use multiple opens to identify when my content has traction with
a client?
CREATED BY STREET CONTXT
Street Contxt manages the distribution of over 16,000,000 emails through our flagship
Edge product every quarter. From those emails, we measure over 8,000,000 unique
interactions, including opens, clicks, and forwards.
We are trusted by firms all over the world to deliver content and collect insights. In Q4
of this year our system has delivered content to well over 400,000 unique contacts
residing all over the world.
Total interactions
70,000,000+ measured
Contacts
400,000+ receving content
Click rates continued to suffer in Q4, but the divide between firms is
widening with some beating the average by over 5x.
20.37%
20.07% 5.92%
5.59%
The fourth quarter of 2018 did not present the expected jump in engagement
benchmarks, with an open rate and click rate coming in just below Q3’s numbers. Most
severely affected is the click rate which did not recover from it’s almost 30%
contraction in Q3.
When digging into these numbers (see chart on next page) we do find that there is a
CREATED BY STREET CONTXT
stark difference in engagement on a firm by firm basis. Looking solely at click rates we
see a decent correlation between the number of contacts being covered and the
overall click rate for a firm.
7%
6%
5%
4% 2018
2017 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
Interestingly firms covering less than 500 contacts seem to have the biggest variance,
with some firms beating the Q4 benchmark by over 5x. This underscores the
importance of having a link strategy to keep clients reading and clicking, as link clicks
can be one of the most clear signals that a client is engaged.
15%
10%
5%
CREATED BY STREET CONTXT
0%
500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000
# of contacts covered
03 — ANTIVIRUS ENGAGEMENT
Q4 - 2018 - QUARTERLY BENCHMARK REPORT
More firms are employing aggressive email antivirus, but the number of
overall antivirus interactions are down as clients continue to use different
devices to access their content.
Often overlooked by other industry analytics tools, anti-virus continues to impact the
collection of engagement data across the street. This trend is one we’ve watched
closely, as false-positive opens or clicks caused by anti-virus software can erroneously
give an email the appearance of being opened multiple times, or skew click rates by
clicking every link contained in an email.
23,000
580,000
Anti-virus systems will open every email, and click every link, looking for viruses.
Anti-virus software is often mandated in larger corporate environments, where it
can affect every email a client receives at work, but with increasing mobile
readership you can no longer assume every email read by a client will be
impacted by anti-virus software. It becomes increasingly difficult to separate
real engagement from machine engagement.
Our system for anti-virus detection uses machine learning and artificial
intelligence to detect behaviour indicative of anti-virus software, and filter out
those clicks and opens across all clients sending to that contact, so the only
engagement data you see is real.
Street Contxt is one of the only platforms built from the ground up to identify and filter
out the false-positive interactions generated by anti-virus software.
CREATED BY STREET CONTXT
04 — CONTENT READ TIMES
Q4 - 2018 - QUARTERLY BENCHMARK REPORT
Clients continue to spend less and less time engaged with an email.
Paying attention to opens is insufficient if you are trying to identify which
content a client is truly engaging with, vs filtering or deleting.
Within Street Contxt we’ve built our analytics to reflect the common behaviours of a
client. While most email tracking systems will register an open as soon as an email
loads, our solution tracks read times, helping you identify clients who are taking the
time to read your content.
45% 9%
40% 6%
35% 3%
30% 0%
Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q2 Q3 Q4
Desktop Mobile
CREATED BY STREET CONTXT
Throughout 2018 we’ve seen a steady decline in the number of opens that span longer
than 16 seconds (what we attribute as a read, instead of a preview, which is less tahn
16 seconds). Across both mobile and desktop the preview rate has had consistent
growth quarter over quarter. Being aware of how long clients engage with content is
key for targeting follow ups. Evaluating consumption based on simple open or didn’t
open is not enough.
05 — DELIVERIES BY DAY
Q4 - 2018 - QUARTERLY BENCHMARK REPORT
In our past benchmark reports we looked at the impact of the day and time you publish
content on the engagement it generates. Since then, we’ve been tracking shifts in
when content is published as firms start to develop new tests and strategies for
optimizing their sending windows.
20%
% of emails sent
15%
10%
5%
CREATED BY STREET CONTXT
0%
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
06 — MEASURING TOTAL OPENS
Q4 - 2018 - QUARTERLY BENCHMARK REPORT
Pairing total opens with the context of who and what can signal ideal
times to follow up with a client.
Detecting when a client or their colleagues have opened an email multiple times is a
great way to see that a note you’ve sent is resonating within a single client.
Street Contxt surfaces total opens from all sources as “additional opens” under the
22,900
companies tab within the email insights page. These additional opens could be a
Domains
single using
client opening ananti-virus
email multiple times, however, when you see an abnormally
at least once in Q3
high additional open count, it can often signal that your content is being circulated
internally at that client.
Understanding that a client has potentially shared content internally can be powerful
when matched with other data. For instance, understanding that content you’ve sent is
relevant to a position that client is holding, combined with a high additional open rate,
may be a strong signal to follow up with that client.
Additional Opens
Additional opens show the opens of the email sent to a specific contact,
recorded from all possible sources. Each count could mean one of a number of
things happened; the original recipient opened the content again on the same
device or a different device, the email was forwarded to someone else who
opened it from a new device, or the email is simply being reopened.
22,900
Domains using anti-virus
While deciphering exactly what is causing these opens can be challenging, we
at least once in Q3
include this number in our insights because when abnormally high; it may help to
indicate that the content is resonating with that specific client and is worth
following up on.
CREATED BY STREET CONTXT
07 — SUMMARY
Q4 - 2018 - QUARTERLY BENCHMARK REPORT
Key takeaways
Click rates continued to suffer in Q4, but specific firms have stood out and are
beating the benchmark by over 5x.
It appears that more firms are employing email antivirus, but the number of
overall antivirus interactions are down as clients continue to use different
devices to access their content.
Clients continue to spend less and less time engaged with an email as
competition increases for their mind share. Paying attention to opens is
insufficient if you are trying to identify which content a client is truly engaging
with.
Small shifts in when content is distributed have not yet uncovered any macro-
level trends. Each firm should continue to iterate on when the ideal time to
target content is.
Pairing total opens with the context of who and what can help signal ideal
times to follow up with a client.
Would you like to see benchmarks like this specific to your clients and team?
We’re providing early access to our Edge Reporting Engine to select clients.
CREATED BY STREET CONTXT
If you think your firm can leverage this sort of insight please reach to our product team
at product@streetcontxt.com.
If you’d like to learn more about how Street Contxt Edge can help you measure your
team’s engagement, get in touch with us at sales@streetcontxt.com
ABOUT THE FIRM
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access invites, analyst marketing dates, or any other commentary through Street
Contxt Edge and use engagement insights to drive follow ups and conversations to
deliver a better client experience, and better results.
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Managing all that content in one place can be done through Street Contxt Hub, the
first knowledge management platform that allows you to manage all internal and
external content, regardless of asset class, and all street wide subscriptions in one
place, while measuring consumption and engagement from all sources.
Collaborate, structure, and engage with your team in a secure environment.