General Settings and Defaults

Default Thresholds

LISTSERV Maestro uses the threshold values supplied on this screen to decide if certain metrics are "good" or "bad" (i.e. within your expectations or not). This information is used for two general purposes: 1.) To mark notification messages as alerts and to distinguish them from normal messages, which allows users receiving those notifications to reduce the volume of received messages by subscribing only to alerts. 2.) To highlight the corresponding metric when it is shown on a screen in Maestro (of which there are many).

Job Statistics Thresholds

The observed actual values of the popular email-marketing metrics open rate, bounce rate and click rate vary significantly depending on the target audience of your messages. For example, in some industries, open rates of 20% or higher are not too uncommon whereas the expected open rates in other industries rarely exceed 10%. More on this below.

To configure the default thresholds for the expected open, click and bounce rates, supply the values on this screen.

The values you supply here act as defaults for all jobs that are sent from owners in your group (or from yourself). (See below about when to override default thresholds.)

Subscriber Warehouse Health Alert Thresholds

If you subscribed to the subscriber warehouse health email and/or notification, then Maestro needs to decide if a specific list's growth trend constitutes an alert or not.

By default, manually added or deleted subscribers are not counted when Maestro determines the list growth rate. If the manual add/delete activity actually happens in response to subscriber requests (for example if subscribers frequently ask you outside of Maestro to remove their addresses), then you may want to enable the option on the bottom of the screen.

Similar to the override behavior for job statistics alert threshold values above, you can override these default settings for a specific list in your subscriber warehouse (for example if the list has recently been imported and contains addresses of unclear quality and you therefore expect the list's size to shrink significantly in the near future).

Job Delivery And Tracking Statistics Notification

In this section you define the settings and defaults for mail job delivery and mail job tracking statistics notifications.

Mail Job Tracking Statistics Notification Wait Time

If this time is too short, then Maestro is unable to consider enough data when measuring the rates. On the other hand, if the configured time is too long, then the quality of the measured rates is high but the notify recipients may have to wait too long for the message's arrival. Try to find a good balance between impatient users and reliable metrics. (A tracking event distribution over time report of a typical mail job may help to find a good value for this delay. Look for the earliest time after delivery at which the majority of events have arrived in Maestro.)

Mail Job Delivery Notification Recipients

Sent on behalf of your account immediately after Maestro has completed processing a mail job delivery, notifications of this type are marked as alert if the delivery failed and as normal notifications if the delivery succeeded.

Mail Job Tracking Statistics Notification Recipients

Sent on behalf of your account when the given notification time after processing a mail job delivery has passed. Maestro uses the configured threshold values for a given job and he actual rates measured for the job to decide if the notification is an alert or not.

Note: The default sets of recipients configured on this screen can be overridden in the properties of specific jobs.

Note: Your own account is always included in the sets of recipients. To configure whether you actually receive the corresponding emails or notifications, see here.

Custom Notification Recipient Addresses

The Maestro Notification Service supports sending notifications to user accounts registered in Maestro. This is the recommended method because each user has the freedom to subscribe to all messages, to alerts only, or even to opt-out completely from receiving a specific type of notification. Additionally, a user may decide to receive notifications directly in the Maestro user interface.

Contrary to this, if a notification is sent to a custom email address without an associated user account, then Maestro has no way to decide if the person receiving the message wants this or not.

Please consider carefully if you actually use custom email addresses and make sure that each address is valid and that the address owner actually wants the notification messages that are sent to the address.

The addresses you supply here are registered for later use when you decide who shall receive delivery or statistics notifications for mail jobs.

Is My Click Rate Good or Bad?

The reporting capabilities of Maestro go beyond the traditional metrics that are typically used in the email-marketing industry. However, when looking at the tracking results of jobs sent from your own account (or group), it is not entirely obvious to decide if for example an open rate of 12% is "good" or "bad".

If the value you supply on the "Default Thresholds" screen is too ambitious (and not overridden for specific mail jobs, see below), then Maestro will too often consider actually measured rates as "unexpected", highlight the associated metrics in reports and classify notifications as alerts.

If, on the other hand, you supply too generous values (i.e. a too low open rate threshold value and a too high bounce rate threshold value), then you effectively disable Maestro's capability to send notifications as alerts (i.e. all notifications are non-alerts) and to highlight tracking metrics in reports.

Using Averages to Determine "Good" Rates: With the Tracking and Delivery Statistics report, you can determine average rates across a configurable set of mail jobs sent from your account or group. By monitoring this report on a regular basis, you can acquire a good feeling of what constitutes a "good" rate by looking at your own email-marketing activities with Maestro in the past.

Researching "Good" Rates in the Internet: An Internet research will quickly give you various resources which list typical email-marketing metrics, usually sub-divided by categories such as the industry. Depending on the resource you are looking at, you may immediately find an industry category that is suitable to your own business. If not, such a resource at least gives you a feeling about what typical rates in other industries look like and, most importantly, that the rates vary considerably for different industries.

About Job-Specific Overrides: Regardless of the method you used to acquire the proper values to supply on the "Default Thresholds" screen, you may still encounter mail jobs whose typical rates differ substantially from those observed for the rest of your mail jobs, for example because you used an unusual recipients set or unusual content. In such a case, it may be desirable to supply override values specific to these jobs. This is possible on the properties screen of each job.