Engagement score

Engagement score is a dynamic indicator of recipient's engagement with the emails of the sender. It provides a very accurate picture of recipient's behavior and business value.

How does engagement scoring work?

In short, it is a mathematical calculation of the recipient's quality based on its responses to the e-mail campaigns sent and its behavior. The system automatically evaluates the whole set of criteria:

• Messages sent messages and their frequency
• Opens and reopens of messages
• Clicks and repeated clicks
• Forwarding, printing or sharing messages to social networks
• Displays in the browser
• Conversions
• Message bounces
• Unsubscribes and spam reports
• and many other little things ...

From this information, the system calculates Engagement score ranking on a scale from 0 to 5 points:

• 0 points - inactive recipients who are not interacting with e-mail sent or messages could not be delivered. This group contains zero or negligible potential for further communication.
• 1 point - inactive recipients who have extremely low number of interactions with emails. There is still a chance of reactivation with this group and should be the target of reactivation campaigns.
• 2 points - recipients with below-average amount of interactions but solid potential for further communication and improved engagement through targeted communication in the form of personalized preferential offers and reduced frequency of messages sent.
• 3 points - is the default value for new recipients and indicates recipients with average interactions. These are the recipients that are usually easy to get their attention and increase engagement especially if they have a neutral or rising trend.
• 4 points - recipients with above-average interest in email messages sent and are generally at the heart of the campaign's success.
• 5 points - your most valuable recipients who interact with almost every email, they like to share these messages (forward, share, etc.) and often make purchases in case of e-commerce emailings.

The default starting score value of each recipient is 3 points. This changes over time as the recipient interacts with messages sent to him. The behavior of the recipients varies depending on many factors - from frequency of the campaigns sent, to the attractiveness of the content, the date and time of delivery, or the availability of the recipient over time (holidays, weekends, etc.). System takes all of these variables into consideration and updates the score on a daily basis.

The Engagement Score separates these fluctuations from the usual behavior of the recipient and provides an accurate picture of the recipient's interest or lack of interest in the long term, including monitoring the trends of individual recipients. Basically, every message sent to the recipient results in a decrease in engagement and the recipient's response (read, click, conversion) increases. Other factors, such as the frequency of messages sent, the past behavior of the recipient, the type of activity, etc., also influences the decrease and increase in engagement.

An important complementary information for individual scores is the engagement trend, which shows the evolution of the beneficiary's behavior. Engagement trend can be:

• rising (2)
• slightly rising (1)
• neutral (0)
• slightly decreasing (-1)
• decreasing (-2)

Why should you use engagement scores?

If you target your campaigns by engagement score or trend → you send fewer messages but better targeted → you will have a higher percentage of relevant recipients → who will respond positively to your messages → which will give you a better reputation → it will give you better deliverability in other campaigns → and that all will lead to better performance for all of your campaigns.

How to use engagement score?

With campaign delivery capping, you can easily define conditions to target recipients with specific engagement score or trend the campaign should be sent to.

Typically, campaigns with strong incentives (discounts, promotional items, etc.) should be sent with low frequency (less than 1 week) to segments with 1 and 2 points to try to reactivate them.

On the other hand, you can send mass campaigns without incentives or with personalized incentives reflecting recipient's importance to high-value customers with 4 or more points.

It is also important to take the engagement trend into account. If the recipient has a downward trend, campaigns need to be adapted to increase incentives or reduce the frequency of messaging. Using a combination of score and trend can be a powerful tool to reduce the frequency and increase the engagement of the recipients.

Using engagement segmentation has a major impact on the success of your campaigns, and thus your return on investment in email marketing. Typically, 70-80% of recipients have low engagement and are therefore primarily a cost, while 20-30% of recipients are those who will bring your business revenues. However, this does not mean that some segments should be ignored while others get more attention - it means that these segments require different type of communication and budget. By using engagement score segmentation, you can not only save significantly on the cost of sending email marketing messages, but also on their preparation. Good campaign execution will reactivate less active recipients, reverse the downward trend, improve engagement and, last but not least, increase the success of your campaigns.