Email Best Practices: The Value of Engagement 

What is 'Engagement'?

'Engagement' is a measurement of a combination of factors made by receiving ISPs to try and determine whether your recipients actually want to be getting your email.  This is a distinction from merely having agreed to receive it by, for example, turning over their email address in a required opt-in form in order to get a whitepaper or other resource. (Learn more about getting permission.)

In their attempt to deliver only the email that their customers want to receive, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail and other top ISPs are known to be watching much more than your complaint rate. They're measuring things like: 

• opens
• clicks
• forwards
• clicking 'this is not spam'
• even 'time spent reading your email'

With this data, they're looking beyond complaints and into the heart of the matter: Do your recipients really want to hear from you?

And it's proven already... if your email is being ignored by their users, you're going to have a harder time getting into the inbox. 
 

What Do I Need to Do?

This is going to be a tough pill to swallow for many marketers, but it's reality now so we're going to lay it on down:

• Only send to people who actually, really, really WANT to hear from you. This means setting super-clear expectations and getting rock-solid permission.
• Send great stuff that people actually, really want to read. Keep the pitch on your website as much as possible.
• Prune your list aggressively. Send to fewer, more interested prospects.
• Re-confirm permission regularly. This could be done in conjunction with the above recommended pruning. (That is: send re-confirmation email to inactive contacts, prune non-responders.)
• Monitor list health by watching your stats. People open and click on emails they like, ignore those they don't. Send more of the former.

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