Engagement score is a dynamic indicator of the recipient's interest in email communication with the sender. It thus provides a very accurate picture of the recipient's behavior and its importance, resp. its business potential.
In short, it is a mathematical calculation of the recipient's quality based on its responses to the email campaigns sent and its behavior. The system automatically evaluates the whole set of criteria:
From this information, the system then creates an Engagement score evaluation on a scale from 0 to 5 points:
The default value of each recipient is a score of 3 points, which then changes over time as the recipient responds to the messages sent to him. Because the behavior of the recipients changes depending on many factors – the frequency of sent campaigns, the attractiveness of the content, date and time of sending, or eg availability of the recipient over time (holidays, weekends, etc.), the system takes into account all these data and updates scores continuously.
The Engagement score eliminates these fluctuations from the usual behavior of the recipient and provides an accurate picture of his/her interest or lack of interest from a long-term perspective, including monitoring the trends of individual recipients. Simply put – each message sent to the recipient results in a decrease in the engagement and response of the recipient (read, click, conversion) on the contrary results in an increase. The decrease and increase of engagement is also influenced by other factors, such as the frequency of sent messages, previous behavior of the recipient, type of activity, etc. This ensures an objective evaluation of the recipients and the strength of their relationship with the sender.
An important additional parameter for individual scores is the engagement trend, which shows the development of the recipient's behavior. The engagement trend can be:
If you target your campaigns by engagement score or trend → you will send fewer messages but better targeted → you will have a higher percentage of relevant recipients → who will respond positively to your messages → gaining a better reputation → which will ensure better delivery also in other campaigns → and this will lead to greater performance of all your campaigns.
In the campaign delivery capping, you can easily define to which recipients with which engagement score or trend the campaign should be sent.
Typically, campaigns with significant incentives (discounts, promotional items, etc.) should be sent with a low frequency (less than 1 week) to segments with 1 and 2 points and try to reactivate them.
Conversely, recipients with 4 or more engagement points can be sent across campaigns without motivation, or with personalized incentives reflecting their importance, as they are highly loyal customers.
It is also appropriate to take into account the engagement trend. If the recipient has a decreasing trend, it is necessary to adjust the campaigns and increase incentives, or reduce the frequency of sending messages. Utilizing a combination of score and trend can be a powerful tool for reducing frequency and increasing recipient engagement.
The use of segmentation according to engagement has a fundamental influence on the success of campaigns and thus the return on investment in email marketing. Typically, 70-80 % of recipients have low engagement, and are thus primarily a cost, on the contrary, 20-30 % of recipients are the recipients who will bring you business results. However, this doesn't mean that some segments can be ignored and others paid more attention to – this means that these segments require different types of care and investment. With the use of segmentation according to the engagement score, you can not only significantly save on the costs of sending email marketing messages, but also on their preparation. By implementing campaigns well, you will reactivate less active recipients, reverse the decreasing trend, improve their engagement and, last but not least, increase the success of your campaigns.