Email engagement: email marketing’s most beloved metric

Email engagement is the most important metric in email marketing, by far.

This statement is so true that 83% of US B2B marketers use email engagement to monitor the performance of the content they produce (eMarketer, 2023). And what is the reason for this?

Well, we can say that, more than being able to deliver a lot of emails in the inbox, knowing whether what is being delivered is pleasing the recipients’ preferences or not can be the difference between the success and failure of email marketing actions, whether for relationship or sales conversions.

What is engagement

In email marketing, engagement refers to the interactions and level of involvement of the recipients of email actions with the messages sent by a company.

This is a very important indicator of the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign, indicating satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the content offered.

Contrary to what you might think, engagement itself is not a metric, but a set of interaction metrics that together make up engagement, including:

• Open rate: this is the percentage of emails opened in relation to emails delivered. It serves as a benchmark for the level of interest that the subject line and sender cause in recipients.
• Click-through rate (CTR): this is the percentage of clicks on the links contained in the email in relation to the total number of emails sent (when calculated in relation to the total number of emails opened, it is called CTOR – click through open rate). This metric shows the level of interest that the content of the email generates in readers.
• Conversion rate: this is the percentage of recipients who carried out a suggested action after clicking on one of the links in the email, such as filling in a form, making a purchase, among others. Here, the metric evaluates the impact of the email marketing campaign on the business objectives.
• Response rate: this is the percentage of recipients who decide to respond to the email. This indicates the recipient’s level of involvement with the company that sent the email.

So, based on this information, we can say that engagement is the totality of recipient interactions with an email.

Negative engagement

When talking about interactions as a whole, we need to remember that there are not only positive interactions in emails, but also actions that demonstrate the recipient’s dissatisfaction with what they have received.

We can mention three types of negative engagement:

• Opt-out (or unsubscribe): on coming to the conclusion that the content sent by the sender is no longer interesting or deviates from the initial information proposals, the recipient can request to unsubscribe via the opt-out link in the email.
• Complaints (or spam complaints): if your frequency of sending messages is too high, the offers are not in line with the recipients’ preferences or you are sending emails indiscriminately to people who have not requested them, you will inevitably end up with a lot of “mark as spam” button triggers. This action is known as a “complaint”.
• Deleting without reading: another indication of negative email interaction is the action of deleting a message without even reading its content, often motivated by the sender or subject line. Being automatically recognized by the recipient as the sender of inopportune or annoying content is bad for online reputation. Airship claims that 48% of consumers say they often delete or ignore emails from brands without even reading them.

Consultancy Gartner said that the top 3 reasons why people unsubscribe (opt-out) from an email list are:

• Too many emails (53.5%),
• Repetitive or redundant emails (46.5%), and
• Subject lines that don’t match the content of the email (30.4%).

Email engagement: when being loved is the key to success

All the interaction actions of recipients are monitored by email service providers in order to contribute to their analysis algorithms, which will ultimately define the destination of email messages. The more positive the engagement, the better the deliverability, and vice versa.

So, obviously, getting recipients to react positively to the messages and offers you send them should be the goal of any digital marketing manager.

This is because when you are able to create a connection between what is sent and the people who will be impacted by the message, this converts into positive email engagement, leading to conversions.

Therefore, the ability to understand people’s preferences and carry out appropriate segmentation, along with the development of captivating subject lines and engaging content, is at the heart of quality email marketing, contrary to the belief that the more people reached by an email action the better.

Think about it for a moment: the statement “one size fits all” has no place in email marketing. The more personalized the messages (in terms of content and offers), the greater the chances of positive engagement.
Connection is the key word.

Why positive engagement is good

• Increases authority: email providers monitor the behavior of their customers (the recipients) towards the messages they receive. If the algorithm perceives a positive movement from the recipients, this causes the provider to also behave positively towards the sender.
• Improves deliverability: as a result of positive engagement with interesting and timely emails, email providers’ algorithms often give higher reputation scores to senders (their sending IP addresses and domain). The consequence is that messages are prioritized for delivery to the inbox.
• It allows you to monitor behavior: the more interactions with your emails, the greater the chances of understanding the preferences of the recipients and thus developing better and better targeted content. This will translate into higher conversions in the future.
• It allows trigger-based actions: having highly engaged contact lists, with lots of interactions, allows you to program interaction-based, or trigger-based, email actions. You can program emails that will only be sent to and when a recipient clicks on a specific link in a sent email. For example, sending an email to talk about the launch of a car, in which clicking on the link with details of the vehicle triggers a complementary email with an exclusive invitation to a face-to-face launch event or test drive, can result in even more engagement and positive connection with the brand.

Technical challenges of engagement today

Over the years, as spam-fighting and privacy protection practices have evolved, some technical challenges have become part of the day-to-day life of those who run email marketing campaigns and whose open rate is an important engagement metric.

• GDPR and other regulations: privacy regulations require explicit consent from users for tracking, which can limit companies’ ability to monitor emails without consent.
• Apple MPP (Mail Privacy Protection): with the introduction of MPP in iOS 15, iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey, hiding email opening activity from senders (since emails are preloaded by Apple servers), may result in inflated opening rates and inaccurate data about which users actually opened emails.
• Image blockers: email accounts with default settings for not automatically loading messages prevent tracking pixels from being able to provide information. If the images are not loaded, the opening of the email will not be recorded.
• Anti-spam filters: there are anti-spam filters capable of identifying and removing tracking pixels before they reach the recipients, making it impossible to record the opening interaction.

There are companies trying to develop ways of circumventing tracking pixel blocking mechanisms, such as removing width and height attributes, inserting variable URL lengths, removing query parameters such as the question mark (?), among others. But none of them can guarantee that the opening rates will be completely true to reality.

Click-through is the new open rate

Since one of the main reasons for sending email marketing is conversion, whether it’s clicking on a link to access a blog post, filling in a registration form or even making a purchase, the open rate has started to have less of an impact on marketers’ analysis.

For some time now, the open rate has become more of a vanity metric, since this number can end up being inflated in various ways and not converting into real gains.

For this reason, the email marketing market has been treating click-through rates as “the new open rate”, since it is in the click that the greatest chances of conversion in email marketing lie.

Proof of this is that, at the end of 2023, the metrics most used by professionals to evaluate the effectiveness of promotional emails were click-through rates and conversion rates. (Statista research)

Secrets to super engagement

Well, by now we’ve understood some golden rules and fairly clear guidelines about email engagement:

• Positive engagement improves deliverability.
• Negative engagement, on the other hand, worsens deliverability.
• Timely, segmented (targeted) and quality content increases interactions.
• Focus on opens (but don’t rely on open rates) and clicks (here, yes!).

With these guidelines in mind, we can establish some tactics for success and more interactions in your emails.

Segmentation

Here, the saying “less is more” fits perfectly. We’re not saying to send fewer email campaigns, but to send emails to fewer people with each campaign.

In other words, the more focused on a theme or preference your email campaign is, the more niche your target audience will be. However, the chances of getting real engagement stimulated by the connection with the message will be much higher.

That’s why you can send several campaigns, but each with a specific focus and a well-segmented group of recipients.

Dedication to the subject line

It’s a well-known fact in the market that 7 out of 10 people decide through the subject line whether an email message will be read or not.

There is therefore little point in dedicating yourself to producing a complex and well-planned email layout if the subject line is left in the background, or even ignored.

On the contrary, the 60 or so visible characters of the subject line must be planned with priority and total strategic commitment, as this is the element that will act as the message’s calling card and will define whether the email will be read. Bet on total transparency about content, personalization and emotional connections.

Pay attention to sending times

According to HubSpot, in the American market, 27% of people said that the best day to send email marketing is Tuesday, followed by Monday (19%). And the best time to send emails (both B2C and B2B) is between 9am and 12pm.

This is a change from the trend that pointed to Tuesdays and Thursdays as ideal sending days.

Obviously, we need to remember that a trend is not a rule.

But keeping an eye on your recipients’ behavior and collectively mapping the times of interaction will help you understand what the ideal time is: when your recipients will be available and interested in reading your emails.

Invest in transactional emails

If there’s one category of email that’s almost guaranteed to get engagement, it’s transactional emails. After all, this is the type of email that recipients want.

Transactional emails are necessary when there is a registration that requires a two-factor authentication confirmation and also for password recovery, purchase confirmations, among others. These are emails that need to be opened and read.

This is an excellent opportunity to build a positive reputation with email service providers, so that your future commercial or content messages have better deliverability results.

Conclusion

More than just ensuring that emails reach the recipients’ inbox, it is necessary to understand whether the content sent is meeting their preferences and expectations.

Positive engagement not only improves deliverability, but also increases the sender’s reputation with ESPs, leading to better results in future campaigns.

On the other hand, negative engagement can be very damaging to your online reputation and the effectiveness of your communications.

It is therefore necessary to focus efforts on segmentation strategies, personalization and the creation of relevant and timely content in order to gain and maintain the interest of recipients, converting interactions into concrete results.

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