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Engagement for Email Delivery


Speaking of feeling inundated, welcome to today’s email inbox! In reality, most consumers today don’t feel overwhelmed by email. That’s just a bias that we marketers who live in our inboxes for a living bring to the table. Gmail, Microsoft’s Outlook.com, and Yahoo! Mail have been honing their filters to catch and delete most spam before consumers see it. So for most users, an inbox is a comfortable, stable environment.

For marketers, however, the story is a bit different. Because today’s inbox providers have stepped up their efforts beyond mere spam filtering, having a consumer’s permission to send email is just a starting point. Increasingly, inbox providers are weighing a variety of factors when determining whether your email goes to the inbox, spam folder, or straight to the trash. These include:

Prior engagement: Has the recipient read and clicked on links in your prior emails, or sent them all straight to the trash?

Time spent: Time spent viewing prior emails.

Current email activity: How others engage with emails.

User markings: When other users mark emails as “spam.”

Priority designation: Whether you are designated by recipients as a priority-sender or a trusted-sender IP address.

Address familiarity: Whether or not your sender email address in the recipient’s address book.



While not anywhere as public as social media engagement, email engagement carries the same importance; that is, it can determine whether or not your intended audience sees your messages. As a result, it’s never been more critical for marketers to increase their email SUBSCRIBERS’ engagement with each message they send. This means:

Making each email more relevant by better leveraging SUBSCRIBER preferences and data to personalize content

Testing content, subject lines, and design to improve performance

Designing emails to render properly across PC, smartphone, and tablet devices—especially since more U.S. consumers now open emails on mobile devices than either desktop or webmail clients9

Initiating reengagement campaigns for dormant SUBSCRIBERS

Purging your email SUBSCRIBER database of unresponsive recipients



That last step is a difficult one for many marketers to take, especially when you’re also trying to grow the size of your email SUBSCRIBER audience. However, in my experience, scrubbing inactive SUBSCRIBERS from your email database can help overall deliverability and increase audience profitability.

Money Can’t Buy You Love

In July 2013, the U.S. Inspector General’s office released the results of its audit of the State Department’s Bureau of Information Programs. Among its findings was the little gem that the State Department spent $630,000 buying Facebook FANS via ad campaigns over the prior two years. Unfortunately, the FANS they obtained delivered very little engagement after their campaigns ended.10

Now you could go ballistic about government waste, but I’m going to suggest you first look in the mirror. Countless companies have fallen for scams promising to sell them high-quality email SUBSCRIBERS, Facebook FANS, and Twitter FOLLOWERS. Indeed, if you Google “buying Facebook FANS” right now, you’ll see all sorts of social snake-oil salesmen trying to separate your company from its hard-earned cash.

Buying SUBSCRIBERS, FANS, and FOLLOWERS isn’t just bad business; it’s illegal in many countries. And while incentives are a great way to get consumers to like, follow, and subscribe to your brand, incentives that have nothing to do with your products or services do little but attract the wrong crowd. Size matters, but engagement is what actually pays the bills. Don’t be fooled.





Engagement for Increased Mobile App Usage


If a mobile app is central to your business or marketing strategy, then increasing SUBSCRIBER engagement is critical to your success. Consider that:

Wireless data traffic is set to grow 66 percent a year through 2017.11

Over four times as many smartphones were sold in 2012 as PCs.12

Smartphone users check their devices an average of 150 times daily.13



The problem with many companies’ mobile app strategies, however, is the same problem they had with websites in the mid-1990s: they have a “build it and they will come” mentality. Neither websites nor mobile apps are a “Field of Dreams” where millions of users walk out of the cornfields mindlessly to download your app.

Both the Apple AppStore and Google Play have over one million apps available to consumers. To stand out among that crowd, you need to promote your app to your proprietary audiences (and you probably need paid advertising). Even assuming you do get SUBSCRIBERS to download your app, you still need them to use it in order to derive any benefit from your investment.