Engagement — whether contacts open your emails and click your links — is one of the most important metrics in email marketing, and segmenting your list by engagement lets you send more relevant messages that lift results. The three biggest engagement drivers to focus on are relevance, a clear CTA, and the right frequency.
This article explains what engagement is and what drives it, how to segment a list by engagement using a five-level Engagement Score (Not engaged, At risk, Neutral, Engaged, Highly engaged), what to do with each segment, and the benefits: greater relevancy, higher engagement and loyalty, and better deliverability.
What is engagement in email marketing?
Engagement is one of the most critical metrics in email marketing. By engagement in this context, we mean if our contacts actively open and click the links in our emails. Following engagement as a key metric makes sense. When people open and click the links in your emails, it probably means that they find your emails relevant – interesting and useful.
If you want to find out what’s a good email open or click-through rate or check how your email marketing and automation campaigns stack up against others in your industry, here are our regularly updated Email Marketing Benchmarks.
What drives email marketing engagement?
There are a lot of factors contributing to contact engagement. The more time you have, the more you can dive into details. However, I’d recommend focusing on the following three:
- Relevance: do your contacts find your emails valuable? Why should people subscribe to your email marketing communication?
- CTA: do your contacts know what you expect them to do? Do you plan each email with a clear call to action in mind?
- Frequency: do you aim at sending the right amount of information? Are you in the sweet spot between not too few and not too many?
Look at your email marketing program from these three angles, and you’ll be on track towards an engaging marketing communication.
What is a segmented email campaign?
The mission of effective email marketers is to send the right emails to the right people at the right time. Sending one email blast to all the contacts on your list doesn’t bring the best business results. Today, with all the marketing technology available, this approach is simply not good enough.
One of the techniques that offer a huge leap towards engagement is segmentation. Segmenting a contact list is grouping your contacts based on their characteristics, needs, and preferences.
Careful segmentation allows you to diversify your email marketing communication and send emails relevant to particular groups of contacts.
Take a look at the following example from Movement – a fashion ecommerce brand:
Depending on the behavioral data (clicks), you can determine contact category preferences and create segments accordingly. You can automatically identify and group contacts who are active, e.g., interested in women’s watches or men’s jewelry.
How to segment an email list based on engagement
There are several ways to track contacts’ engagement. If you use a professional email marketing platform, you can add or subtract scoring points based on user behavior (e.g., opens and clicks).
GetResponse automatically identifies and scores the activity of your contacts based on their interactions with your emails. This feature is called Engagement Score. Based on real-time data, we put contacts on a certain Engagement Level, choosing from a 5-step scale:
- Not engaged – not interested in the sent content at all
- At risk
- Neutral
- Engaged
- Highly engaged – actively reacting to messages, opening them, and clicking the links.
The Engagement Score will be displayed in the form of a bar under the Search contacts tab, in the column with your contacts names:
You can use this 5-step scale to create engagement-based segments.
What can you do with contact segments based on engagement?
Looking closely at the engagement level allows you to find out what’s right and what’s wrong about your email marketing. Dig for insights, and align your communication with your contacts’ needs and preferences.
You can then create emails for each contact group to increase their engagement in a way that will be the most relevant.
- Not engaged: run a reactivation campaign. Remove contacts that don’t respond for a long time in order to maintain a proper contact list hygiene.
- At risk: ask them for feedback. Maybe they’d like to change something in your email marketing program.
- Neutral: find out what makes them click. Maybe you could personalize your communication even more.
- Engaged: check out why your email communication resonates with these people so much.
- Highly engaged: some of these folks are your best customers and advocates. Think of how you could reward them (and don’t forget to ask them for testimonials).
If you want to learn how to reactivate your contacts, here’s a step-by-step guide.
What are the benefits of engagement-based segmentation?
| Benefit | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Greater relevancy | Draw conclusions about what resonates; test hypotheses with A/B testing |
| Increased engagement & loyalty | Right message to right people means more opens, clicks, and longer list retention |
| Better deliverability | Higher engagement signals valuable content, so emails reach the inbox more reliably |
There are many benefits of tracking engagement and engagement-based contact segmentation. Here are three benefits that I find particularly noteworthy:
1. Greater relevancy: draw conclusions from your engagement. What content seems to resonate more? What products are the most popular? Is there anything you can do to improve your communication and target your audience more precisely?
Making hypotheses and running A/B tests to prove them is a great way to improve the efficiency of your email marketing communication.
A while ago, we created a case study with Submission Technology – one of our customers, whose primary goal is to increase member engagement through relevant content. With a high-volume contact list, even tiny details might have a huge impact on the overall performance.
2. Increased engagement and loyalty: sending the right messages to the right people is a win-win approach. Your contacts are more likely to open your emails and follow the CTAs. They’re also more likely to stay longer on your email list. These factors directly translate into business results.
3. Better deliverability: the engagement ratio impacts your email deliverability. In other words, if your contacts open and click the links in your messages, it means that they find your content engaging and valuable. In such case, your emails won’t have problems reaching the inbox.
Read more related content:
1. 12 email list management best practices
Try out the engagement score yourself
I’m sure that after reading this article, you know exactly what to do to track and use engagement in your email marketing. If you are a GetResponse customer, here’s a link explaining what engagement score is and how you can use it.
If you don’t have a GetResponse account yet, you can start your free trial now and try out all the cool features.
Good luck with increasing the engagement-score!
FAQ
What is engagement in email marketing?
Engagement refers to whether your contacts actively open your emails and click the links in them. When people do, it usually means they find your emails relevant, interesting, and useful.
What drives email marketing engagement?
Three main drivers: relevance (do contacts find your emails valuable), CTA (do they know what to do), and frequency (are you sending the right amount — not too few, not too many).
How do you segment an email list based on engagement?
Use a platform that scores contact activity from opens and clicks. GetResponse’s Engagement Score places contacts on a five-level scale — Not engaged, At risk, Neutral, Engaged, and Highly engaged — which you can use to build engagement-based segments.
What are the benefits of engagement-based segmentation?
Greater relevancy (you learn what resonates and can A/B test it), increased engagement and loyalty (right message to the right people), and better deliverability (higher engagement helps your emails reach the inbox).
What should you do with unengaged contacts?
Run a reactivation campaign, and remove contacts that don’t respond for a long time to maintain proper list hygiene.
