How Subscriber Engagement Impacts Your Deliverability

Every few weeks, we have a customer reach out to ask asking about declining email open rates and what’s going on with their deliverability.

The process for identifying a potential problem is always the same and usually involves looking at factors such as spam complaints, number of bad addresses/bounces, content, etc.

However, there’s another piece of the puzzle that is largely ignored for one reason or another, and that’s email engagement. (And it’s the piece that MOST marketers are extremely resistant to addressing).

Let’s talk about how this piece impacts your overall email marketing program and cover a little bit of backstory and look at some of the trends relating to how ISPs (like Gmail, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) look at email and change their algorithms to reflect availability of data, changes in the industry and so forth.

Several years ago, if Subscriber Sam clicked the spam button, it had little effect on your overall email program.

But, as time went on, the ISPs began to look at that as an indicator as to how subscribers view your messages in general. “Too many spam complaints likely means that subscribers don’t really want these messages, so we’ll just send them all to the spam folder in order to help improve the customer experience.” The small percentage of people that do want the messages can always dig them out of the spam folder.

Remember, the ISPs are concerned about the experience of THEIR subscribers, NOT whether or not YOUR email messages make it through. Their goal is to provide subscribers with the email messages they actually want and they do their best to filter out unwanted mail.

The ISPs don’t know whether or not your list is 100% opt in or if whether your subscribers have confirmed. It’s possible that you have 100% confirmed optin list and still receive high complaints due to message content, message frequency, etc.

Fast forward a few years and we’re seeing a similar pattern with email engagement.

The fewer people that open your messages, the higher the likelihood that your email messages will start trickling into the spam folder more and more. This happens for a few reasons…

One… the ISPs can see that Subscriber Joe, for example, is no longer opening your email messages and after a certain period of time simply drops them in the spam folder for that ONE subscriber as not to clutter his inbox with unwanted mail. The ISPs are learning from the individual subscriber behavior.

Keep in mind that this is absolutely natural. People lose interest in things, changes phases in their lives, etc. List churn is a normal part of the marketing life cycle.

Two… When TOO MANY people stop reading your messages and engaging with your content, the ISPs see that and assume that the majority of people don’t want to receive your messages, so they send more and more of the email addressed to the unengaged users to the junk folder.

NOTE: Keep in mind that subscribers open different messages based on time of day, subject line/interest, and so on. Some subscribers check their email only every so often while others are going through email all day every day, reading and responding to messages as they come in and what’s considered a “good” open rate varies by industry and even by list.

So, while you may THINK that it doesn’t cause any harm to continue to email subscribers who no longer open your messages, the contrary is true. The fewer people that are engaging with your emails, the higher the probability that the ISPs will filter more and more of your emails to the spam folder.

What this means to you:

1. You simply MUST clean out the unengaged users. PERIOD. If people are not opening your emails, it’s time to do something different.

Start with a re-engagement campaign and try to get them back on board. If they don’t bite, move to other methods to reach them or, at the very least, mail MUCH less frequently.

(See: How to Get Your Email Opened First)

2. The marketer with the best list segmentation wins.

Not every offer appeals to every subscriber. Start segmenting based on behaviors and send offers that subscribers are more interested in hearing about.

While this means you may not be sending a specific offer to your full list, it does mean that you can send multiple offers to SEGMENTS of your list.

3. The old philosophy of mailing until they dropped off or bought is not longer healthy for your email program. The cost of mailing to unengaged users is too great.

How Subscriber Engagement Impacts Your Deliverability