Your email list health is a crucial aspect of successful email marketing, but what does it mean for an audience to be “healthy?” How can you make sure your subscriber list stays strong, fit, and productive? One important tool for monitoring and optimizing your audience involves an important stat: “Engaged!”
Your Email List Can Improve Your Sender Reputation
Mad Mimi defines “engaged” as when a recipient takes a trackable, positive action upon receiving your mailing. This could mean their inbox allowed image downloads (so the reader sees your pictures), or that the reader has clicked a link or used the “forward to a friend” option.
Engagement is great! Internet Service Providers and email clients actually monitor the percentage of recipients who engage with the emails you send. They use this information to help determine your overall sender reputation (i.e. your ability to reach inboxes, instead of spam/junk folders, based on your history as a responsible sender). High engagement rates help build and maintain a strong sender reputation!
Most types of mail should yield a minimum 10-15% engagement. When continually sending to a terminally unengaged group of subscribers, however, stats will fall below those industry norms and affect your sender reputation negatively. This makes it increasingly difficult to reach your truly interested subscribers’ inboxes due to the delays and filtering issues a diminished sender reputation causes. Without the proactive attention, the downward spiral continues.
So, how do I use “Engaged” to improve my Email List?
A little audience maintenance goes a long way! Keeping track of clicks, views, and shares (engagement), and using those stats to target your follow up mailings is a great way to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns. The true value of your list is in its quality, not necessarily its quantity. One single subscriber who clicks through to visit your site, purchase your product, or hear your song is infinitely more valuable than 1,000 who never do any of those things.
Additionally, terminally unengaged subscribers actually work against your success in email marketing. They take up audience space in your account, increase your costs, dilute your stats, and devalue your sender reputation. This make it harder to reach those most valuable, truly interested subscribers’ inboxes. A proactive sending approach with periodic list updates should yield really favorable results!
So, periodic maintenance involving your engagement statistics is a great way to keep a strong email list. We’re always here to help out with your audience health however we can (and thus, productive sending!). Contact us at support@madmimi.com to figure out the next best step!
Additional Resources:
