Is your email engaged?

The definition of email engagement has been debated for the past several years.  Simply put, anytime an email is touched it is engaged.  This includes Clicks, Opens and the movement of an email out of the Spam Folder.  Engagement is used by some major ISP’s to measure positive feedback that is based on the engaged action an email recipient performs on email they receive, for example from your email campaign .  How engagement feedback is perceived by an ISP may become an internal benchmark that affects your email deliverability to that ISP.

Deliverability is affected by many factors, some controllable, some out of your control.  You may think email engagement is one of those factors out of your control, but is it?  By definition, when an email is engaged there is a positive action taken on it by the recipient.  It is believed that some ISP’s utilize the user engagement stats to determine if your sent email messages are actually wanted by your subscribers, compared to those messages that aren’t wanted or acted upon (engaged).  With this information in hand the ISP may take adverse action on your mailings, which may include slowing down your email delivery to blocking your email altogether.  Logically, then, the less engaged your email recipients are the more undesirable effect on your reputation.

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