About Email Marketing Engagement

Email marketing engagement is a measure of how your subscribed contacts interact with your emails. We take their click activity, compare it to how long they’ve been in your audience, and classify them on an engagement scale.

In this article, you’ll learn about email marketing engagement levels and how to use that information to create targeted emails.

Levels of engagement

Subscribed contacts can fall into 1 of 4 email marketing engagement levels at a given time: new, rarely, sometimes, or often. To determine a contact’s level of engagement, we’ll compare their activity score to how long they’ve been subscribed to an audience. Here’s some more information on each of those measures.

• Activity
  Each contact's campaign activity, specifically clicks, is measured against your sending frequency.
• Time subscribed
  A simple measure that looks at when someone subscribed to receive marketing content from you.

We recalculate contact engagement levels as you send emails. Here’s an overview of all the levels of contact engagement.

If someone subscribed to your audience less than a month ago, we'll mark them as new unless they have a negative activity score. Contacts will earn a negative activity score if their address bounced, or if they've filed a complaint against you. If they aren't engaging with your emails, or don't click links in your emails, we’ll mark them as rarely engaged.

Keep in mind that these engagement categories are simply a tool for you to use. How you value each category depends on what’s normal for you and your business. For example, if your business is seasonal, lower overall engagement may be normal for you outside your peak sending period.

Examples

Let’s say you send a monthly newsletter to your entire audience. Here’s what the different engagement levels might look like over a 12 month period.

• Contact A just signed up. They read your most recent newsletter, but we need more time to tell if they’ll remain engaged. This contact’s engagement level is New.
• Contact B subscribed to your newsletter a year ago, but clicked 1 link. This contact’s engagement level is Rare.
• Contact C occasionally reads your newsletter when they see it at the right moment. They clicked 2 links, so their engagement level is Sometimes.
• Contact D regularly reads your newsletter and finds content that interests them. They clicked several links. This contact’s engagement level is Often.

What you can do with email marketing engagement

Think of email marketing engagement as another piece of data you have about your subscribed contacts. You can view this information on the audience dashboard and in the segment builder.

To target specific sets of contacts, you can use email marketing engagement data in your segments.

Here are a few ways you can use email marketing engagement to segment and target contacts.

• Reward engaged contacts
  Create a segment of your contacts who engage often and offer a discount or promotion to say thank you.
• Re-engage contacts
  Create a segment to target contacts who rarely engage with your content and offer them an incentive to re-engage, like a special offer or giveaway. If your contacts still aren’t engaging with your emails, consider targeting them with an ad instead.
• Combine segmentation criteria
  You can create a more complex segment to target contacts based on engagement and something else about them. For example, you might want to target people who engage often and interact with all your emails, but don’t actually buy anything. To do this, you’d segment based on email marketing engagement and e-commerce purchase data.

Next steps

Ready to get started? Learn how to create and send to a segment, or take a look at all the segmentation options available to you.