Engagement is a measure, in days, of how long it has been since a contact has filled out a webform, purchased a product, opened an email, or clicked on an email. Sending emails to unengaged contacts can drastically reduce the success of the deliverability of your emails.
Why Sending to Unengaged Contacts is Problematic
When an Email Provider (Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, etc.) is determining what to do with an email sent to one of their users, a key piece of data that they look at is the days since last engagement. The longer it has been since the user last engaged with email from the sender, the likelihood of that email being sent to the Spam folder, or rejected altogether, increases. This judgement can also be applied to other email sent by the sender. If too much unengaged mail is sent, the Email Provider will begin to Spam Folder or reject more and more mail from the sender. Even email that would be considered “good” in isolation. Thus, email messages that are being sent to recipients who expect and want the email, might not be delivered. This degrades email deliverability for all.
How to Avoid Sending to Unengaged Contacts
Because sending to unengaged contacts can negatively impact the delivery of email to engaged contacts who want to receive email, it’s important to periodically evaluate your email contact list in the your app, identify unengaged contacts, and attempt to re-engage them with a re-engagement email broadcast or campaign. Contacts who do not re-engage should then be marked as non-marketable and no longer sent email. Your application includes a List Hygiene tool that will automatically identify contacts who are becoming unengaged and mark completely unengaged contacts as non-marketable.
Email Compliance Success
Successful email sending is fairly simple, it boils down to List, Content, and Frequency.
- The email List is the key to good results with email marketing. As much as possible, the Email List should only include contacts who are proven to both want and to expect email from the sender. Engagement is a key component to determining both of these criteria.
- The Content of each email needs to be on message, on brand, valuable, and not “spammy”. Sending poorly constructed emails is a quick way to get recipients to opt-out from, complain about, or un-engage with a sender.
- The Frequency of email sending is the third piece to good email marketing. A recipient can be engaged and the content can be sparkling, but if they receive 3 emails a day from a sender, it will quickly cause them to opt-out from, complain about, or un-engage with a sender.
Glossary of Terms
Bounce Rate - The percentage of email that is rejected by the Email Providers. Calculation - Total Email Rejected / Total Email Sent
Deliverability - The percentage of email that is accepted by the Email Providers. Calculation - (Total Emails Sent - Bounced Email) / Total Email Sent
Inbox Rate - The percentage of email that is delivered to the Inbox. Calculation - Total Email Delivered to the Inbox / (Total Emails Sent - Bounced Email)
Open Rate - The percentage of email that is opened by the recipient. Calculation - Total Emails Opened / (Total Emails Sent - Bounced Email)
Click Rate - The percentage of email that has a link clicked by the recipient. Calculation - Total Emails Clicked / (Total Emails Sent - Bounced Email)
Blacklist - A list of IP Addresses that have been identified as sending Spam, or unwanted email in excessive amounts. These lists are used by Email Providers as part of their decision as to whether or not to accept mail from a sender.
Engagement - Engagement is a measure, in days, of how long it has been since a contact has filled out a webform, purchased a product, opened an email, or clicked on an email.