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In press releases like today's, we like to talk about "engagement" in positive terms, focusing on all the ways you can advance your email program by using behavioral tracking to figure out who's most interested in your mailings, and what types of content they find most engaging.  It's an optimistic message about the truth that you can take more control over your email marketing success.

But there's a parallel truth about engagement, a dark side that every marketer should also understand: if you're recipients aren't engaged, your deliverability is likely to suffer as a consequence.  Increasingly, the major ISPs are looking at how recipients act on (or don't act on) the mailings you send them, as part of how they determine which bulk emails to treat as spam.

For every email that leaves our system, we have the ability to track behaviors like opens, clickthroughs, and forwards.   And our system includes reports on all of these behaviors, and also uses these metrics to compile an "engagement index" for each mailing and recipient.  But those aren't the only engagement metrics available.

No, those are just the metrics available to the sender.  There are many "engagement" measurements that can be taken by those who manage receiving systems.   Consider the things that ISPs have the opportunity to track for inbound mail:

• Whether it was reported as spam.  It's been known for a long time that complaints hurt your deliverability.
• Whether it was deleted without being opened.   When behaviors like this tell the ISP that recipients don't care about your messages--even if they did opt-in to receive them--your reputation with the ISP can suffer.  Why should the ISP make delivering your mail a priority, when your recipients' actions say they don't want it?
• Whether your recipients choose to unblock links and images in your message.  If they do, that's a good sign to the ISP that you're sending content your recipients want.  If they don't, your reputation gets no such boost.
• Whether your recipients forward your message, or reply to it.  These actions also indicate to the ISP that your emails are, on some level, a higher form of communication than spam.  This is why my colleague Kris Dougherty admonishes you not to use "noreply" addresses that discourage 2-way communication, because an absence of communication doesn't help your reputation as a sender.

The key to getting email delivered in bulk to the ISPs is not to make your messages look like spam.   More and more, the ISPs are using engagement metrics among their many tools to protect their users from unwanted messages.  If they're checking to see how much your subscribers want your messages, shouldn't you be checking, too?

Chris Broshears | Product Development