One of the most critical questions every email marketer faces is: “Am I creating strong email campaign engagement?” Sure, you can simply go to your dashboard and review the open rates, click through rates and bounce rates of your email campaigns and newsletters, but what you really need is to be able to prove how engaging your email marketing efforts are in the long run.

In this blog post, we will help you to dive deeper into finding the advanced techniques recommended to evaluate email engagement by the subscriber, going beyond just the basic metrics of inbox delivery. Using these sophisticated measures of reviewing your emails will enable you to identify all aspects of your emails that are not working and need improvements.

  1. Engagement with Creative – A good starting point would be to measure opens and clicks. Combining the two to measure Click-To-Open Rates (CTOR) will show you the percentage of subscribers who decided to open the email and clicked through to a link on the email. CTORs are especially useful in measuring the effectiveness of your content, creative, as well any Calls to Action (CTAs) across various campaigns.
  2. Subscribers’ Long-Term Engagement – While CTRs and open rates can give you a good short-term analysis of the performance of your email campaigns, it is equally important to also monitor how well your audience is interacting with your communication over a longer period of time to ensure there is no decline. Long-Term engagement should be measured for a more holistic analysis of your email programmes. For this, you will need to evaluate all metrics of subscriber actions that suggest engagement, including opens, clicks, social shares, comments, purchases and checkouts and downloads over a quarter, six months or even a year. This will help you assess the number of subscribers who are active and regularly interacting with you.
  3. Profiling and Segmenting Your Engagement – Another common observation of seasoned email marketers is that there is always a specific group or groups of subscribers who interact more with your emails. To find out these segments and profiles, you will need to compile a report on engagement and/or responses among various demographic groups. This can be across age, gender, devices and even Socio-Economic Class (SEC) levels. This will allow you to create email campaigns targeting the less responsive groups.
  4. Customer Lifecycle Engagement – It is a common observation that the subscriber’s engagement with your emails is much higher when you first at them to your database and you send them the initial emails. This can severely decline with time and so you need to closely monitor the lifecycle engagement of your subscribers. You will need to see any user behavior changes with slight changes in your communication and if you target individuals with specific categories of their interest. It helps to always target your audience with dynamic content, building on the previous clicks to your emails by your subscribers.

We also encourage you to check out our other blog on 10 Ways to Keep Your Email Engagement Fresh and Optimized.

What is Click-To-Open Rate (CTOR) and how does it differ from click-through rate in email marketing?
How do you measure long-term email subscriber engagement beyond open rates?
Why does email engagement decline over the customer lifecycle and how can you prevent it?
How does segmenting subscribers by demographics improve email campaign engagement?