Email deliverability isn’t just about getting your emails to the inbox. It’s about learning how engagement with subscribers impacts positively or negatively where your emails go and whether they end up in the spam folder instead. Email service providers (ESPs) pay attention to how subscribers interact with your messages’ engagement signals that reflect how well you’re doing with your campaign and subsequent sender reputation. Here, we’ll discuss engagement signals that affect email deliverability and how to change your behavior to improve inbox placement rates and efficacy for email marketing.
What Are Engagement Signals, and Why Do They Matter?
Engagement signals are subscriber behaviors that reflect interest or lack thereof in your message. For example, subscribers engage when they open an email, click on a link, reply to you, forward an email, or flag an email as important. On the other hand, they do not engage when they delete an email without opening it, unsubscribe and mark it as spam, or fail to open it altogether. Warmy.io helps analyze these engagement signals in real time, allowing marketers to optimize their email strategy and adjust campaigns for maximum deliverability and interaction.
Email Service Providers (ESPs) pay attention to this activity to determine how effective your emails are and how relevant and high-quality your content happens to be. When engagement signals skew positively, this tells ESPs that your content is worthwhile; they increase your sender reputation, making it easier for you to send more emails down the line. When signals are overwhelmingly negative, you risk damaging your reputation significantly, preventing you from ever reaching subscriber inboxes again.
Positive Engagement Signals and How They Improve Deliverability
Engagement signals from subscribers that reflect positively include opening your email, clicking links within, responding to you, forwarding your messages to new recipients, or marking your email as important. These activities show active interest from the subscriber on their end and also serve as signals to ESPs that recipients really want what you’re sending. When ESPs see this happening more often than not, they increase your sender reputation score over time, making it more likely that your content will appear in inboxes instead of the spam folder. In this way, content is king and queen too for deliverability. The more you can create strategic content that drives this kind of engagement, subject lines that draw attention, personalized pushes to drive clicks or responses, even polls and clickable content within the body of the email the more likely you are to have positive signals and maintain excellent deliverability.
Negative Engagement Signals and Their Impact
When email service providers (ESPs) see signals of negative engagement, such as people deleting emails without opening them, marking them as spam, clicking unsubscribe or ignoring your emails altogether, they interpret that content isn’t resonating with subscribers. Negatives happen even more frequently and faster than a positive engagement, and it’s the fastest way to tarnish your sender reputation with ESPs, who want their spam mail filtered or even better, blocked. Specifically, a high spam complaint rate kills reputation. Companies should regularly audit their subscriber lists, including a clear and easy unsubscribe option, and under promise and over deliver.
The Role of Inbox Providers and Algorithms
Email inboxes, such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, constantly update their algorithms to decide where an email lands by virtue of engagement. They pay attention to subscriber behavior, employing machine learning to learn what subscribers want and what they’re deeming as spam. They note how fast someone opens an email, how often they reply, and if they delete emails without reading or flagging them as spam. By investigating these deliverability concerns and the subsequent rules of engagement, marketers can stay ahead of the game and ensure they don’t fall into any avoidable traps while maintaining a good sender reputation through relevant and engaging email sends.
How Email List Quality Affects Engagement Signals
A clean, responsive email list helps ensure positive engagement metrics. Inactive lists and invalid addresses contribute to higher bounce rates, spam traps, and lower engagement. When you continually send to uninterested parties, the ESPs know that your emails aren’t appreciated; thus, they punish your future deliverability. By checking and cleaning your email lists, often removing inactive users and checking invalid email addresses, you maintain a consistently high engagement rate, leading to better deliverability and successful campaigns.
The Importance of Segmentation and Personalization
In addition, higher engagement signals are derived from segmented emailing lists and personalized content. The more a relevant message goes to someone who wants it due to preference, location, or previous activity the more it’s likely to get opened and clicked through. Personalized emails create a bond between the creator and the reader, and the reader is likely to engage favorably each time they receive such content. Moreover, when people receive exactly what they signed up for, there are fewer spam complaints.
Encouraging Subscribers to Whitelist Your Emails
When your subscribers manually add you to their contacts or whitelist your emails, this action lets inbox providers know that your content is legitimate and that users actually want to receive what you are sending. This feedback lets email services know that you take particular care to ensure important communications are received by your subscribers, boosting your sender reputation and email deliverability. However, to reap this reward, you must make actively whitelisting easy for your subscribers and give them the info they need to do so.
The best way to position this opportunity in your favor is to provide this whitelisting information during your welcome series right off the bat to set expectations and promote good action from the start. Use simple language to let your new subscriber know how they can whitelist your emails, even showing an example or two or providing easy step-by-step instructions for understanding. The fewer questions your subscribers have about the process, the more likely they are to do it.
Furthermore, you want to remind your subscribers within your subsequent communications that they should whitelist you so you continue getting delivered to their inbox. Sometimes people forget; other times, they see your instruction once and never again. By subtly reminding them in your newsletter or any promotional email that you want them to whitelist you helps solidify the necessity of inbox placement as you send it regularly to them. The more you advocate for whitelisting in various places, the more trust and transparency you provide to your subscribers. Building that relationship ensures people will want to whitelist you and continue to engage with your emails.
In addition, once you are whitelisted, your communications always come through, meaning your important announcements, limited-time offers, or customized messages are never lost in a spam folder. When the inbox placement is reliable, subscribers are far more likely to interact with your email collections opening them, clicking through, and even responding. All of these actions will further bolster your reputation with inbox providers, which creates a wonderful cycle that only improves deliverability.
In addition, whitelisting generates higher open and click rates because your subscribers become accustomed to receiving your messages on a consistent basis. When your email shows up in the inbox instead of the spam folder consistently, this indicates to your subscribers that your information is important and that they should follow through with what you want them to do. Not only this, but if they receive your emails out of turn, it may flag something on the subscriber’s end where they hit “not interested” and subsequently lose access to valuable content, which in turn may annoy them and cause them to unsubscribe.
Ultimately, asking your subscribers to whitelist your emails, adding you to their address books or whitelisting is an important step for continued deliverability and effective engagement. Explain the steps and make them clear, follow up with their importance, and explain what benefits subscribers will receive if they whitelist you. This will go a long way in avoiding the spam folder as well as ensuring that your audience engages with you in the future.
Monitoring and Analyzing Engagement Signals
Constantly checking in and reviewing how subscribers engage via analytics keeps awareness of deliverability. For instance, keeping track of open rates, click rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribes will reveal trends and problems before they become too large to control deliverability. Taking the time to adjust by correcting send frequency, content accuracy, or send time shows that you are on top of engagement signals and trying to rectify any bad momentum as quickly as possible.
How Re-engagement Campaigns Can Revive Subscriber Interest
Re-engagement campaigns are one of the best ways to undo the damage of negative engagement signals and are targeted messages sent to subscribers who have become inactive or less engaged over time. When subscribers fail to open, click, or interact with your messages, their silence and lack of engagement can signal to inbox providers that your brand is spammy. When enough people within a certain brand’s subscriber base fail to engage, it could harm sender reputation across the board. Therefore, it’s helpful to assess re-engagement campaigns to send proactive measures before it’s too late.
Re-engagement campaigns often start with a dedicated segment of subscribers removed from the mailing list. In this way, the sender can distinguish and better understand who they are trying to engage once again. This segment provides behavioral insights as to how long they’ve been ineffective, what types of emails they previously opened, and their interest level in certain types of content; thus, creating an easier environment in which customized, relevant messaging could be applied to engage once again.
Crucial in your re-engagement messages is giving subscribers a reason to return. From discounts to promotions, offers and flashes that encourage users to respond are valuable assets to include in re-engagement efforts. The same is true for recommendations based on previous activity or, as might be the case, a simple acknowledgment of no activity something like a “we miss you!” message would do well here to have inactive subscribers feel like they’ve gotten the royal treatment and should respond accordingly.
Exclusive content works well here, too. If subscribers have access to information that other subscribers do not, it makes them feel special. This could be content options, such as premium guides, photos and videos, and private webinars, or access to behind-the-scenes content that a general subscriber base may not see. Once again, putting subscribers in a position where they are given something special fosters the emotional connection that a subscriber feels to the brand and reinforces the need to respond seemingly forever.
Let them know the value of staying on your list. Offer them reasons and remind them of their previous experience or any upgrades that they’ve missed since everything from future content value to what you’ve done to better yourselves helps them understand what they’d be missing otherwise.
Yet even if a targeted re-engagement process is successful more often than not, sometimes it’s best to let go. Those subscribers who don’t come back, even with defined and clear targeted efforts and multiple ones to re-engage, hurt sender reputation and overall list health. Thus, for those defined and clear efforts to re-engage that don’t stick, it’s good to purge these non-responders from the active mailing list. Purging prevents ongoing negative signals for email deliverability and maintains sender reputation because the list remains intact with validated, interested, and active subscribers. Thus, it also increases chances of deliverability to ensure ideal subscribers remain on the list.
The re-engagement process should be assessed and analyzed over time as well. Campaign performance should always be assessed and metrics like opens and clicks should be tracked as well as how many are re-converted among those targeted for re-engagement. This way, you can better understand how to improve your efforts moving forward. Learning from past campaigns will allow you to test for any other additional incentives that might work better down the line or for a more unique audience while viewing and assessing results will keep you in the know as to what statistics suggest. Thus, over time you will be able to maximize targeting success, raise list health standards, and avoid compromised email deliverability.
Ultimately, carefully crafted re-engagement campaigns are an effective way to minimize lost subscriber engagement from the start. Utilizing personal messages, special offers, and bonus content not typically available to non-subscribers entices those who have fallen inactive to return to the fold. However, since many re-engagement campaigns fail to bring back those who haven’t engaged in some time, it’s still important to clean your list of lost causes on a regular basis to keep your list healthy, sender reputation intact, and email metrics healthy.
Conclusion
Email deliverability relies heavily on knowing and using subscriber engagement signals. When you focus on positive signals via personalization and segmentation, as well as relevant content creation and negative signals through list cleansing, deliverability monitoring, and sender feedback requests you fortify your sender reputation and make the most of your email marketing campaigns. Therefore, with engagement signals in mind, you can ensure your emails not only arrive but also resonate with your audience for improved efficacy and future business growth.