Over the last few weeks various brands have decided it’s a good idea to fill my inbox with irrelevant junk which tries to work on the back of the World Cup. The problem with this is many of the links are extremely tenuous – ‘England are out so treat yourself to something nice’ has been the constant theme this week. It’s so predictable I know the email is coming before I receive it.

No value is  added to the email by mentioning the World Cup, it just seems marketers think that this  cuts through the clutter and empathises with their customer base. It doesn’t – it just adds to the clutter of all those other brands and their tenuous World Cup links. It all just reminds me of a politician claiming to like the coolest band of the moment in case it improves their street cred.

Just like I don’t want our politicians spouting on about their hip music collection I don’t want my favourite clothing retailers talking to me about football – that’s why the BBC Sport website and talkSPORT radio exist.

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Emailcenter recently took part the annual J.P. Morgan Round the Island Race. This one-day yacht race around the Isle of Wight attracts 1,700 boats and 16,000 sailors, participating in a number of different classifications. The race is one of the largest yacht races in the world and the fourth largest participation sporting event in the UK after the London Marathon, the Great North and South Runs.

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A new edition into the Maxemail reporting suite is our “Email Engagement Report”.

One of the questions marketers often ask is; if I get 20% open rates for each email campaign, is it the same 20% or a different 20% each time? And how many subscribers never open an email?

The engagement report answers all of these questions by providing an open and click rate for each individual recipient based upon the emails you select. For example if a recipient has received 5 emails, but only opened one and not clicked on any, the report will show their open rate as 20% and click rate as 0%.

The report also shows the last time that someone opened and clicked on an email. This means you can either target those who have not opened in the last 90 days with a different message or even simply create a segment to suppress those that have not opened or clicked in the last 365 days.

Of course you don’t want to suppress those who have only recently signed up, so the report also outputs their first email and a count of how many emails they have received.

Additional data fields can also be added to the report to show how different segments are more or less engaged with your email marketing.