As ISPs begin to lock down deliverability more by combining IP reputation with domain reputation (ie: it's not just the IP you send from but the domain of your email as well), things that set off spam folder triggers such as user spam complaints, defunct email addresses and inbox auto hits, become more important to making sure that you keep your list clean and in the inbox. One tool for ensuring your lists' safety is to segment your list by user engagement.

 

What's user engagement? It's whether a user, with any regularity, has been shown to open and click your past emails. So, for example, if you email once a week, and a user opens the email weekly, he or she is a very engaged user. If he or she opens once a month, then that's a semi-engaged user. And if it's been months since a user opened one of your emails, that's just not an engaged user!

 

Here's the reality. The bulk of your sales will come from your most engaged users, so ensuring that the list of those users gets delivered every time is of key importance. When you send to your disengaged users, you increase the counts of unopened emails, spasm and unsubs - all things that email ISPs notice and which will eventually have you going to spam regularly. The downside is that, likely, you're long term lapsed or disengaged users constitute a huge portion of your list, and even if they respond in small percentage numbers, that's often significant revenue in terms of raw numbers. But in the end, sending less often to your longer lapsed or disengaged customers may be necessary in order to ensure that you can reliably deliver email.

 

One solution? Work harder to keep your list clean and your users engaged. Here are some tips:

 

Send Content that Matters: We say it all of the time, but if you're sending content that your users, clients and customers want, you'll have better overall engagement metrics. Don't cheap out on content.

 

Give People and Option of Email Frequency: When joining your list, let people determine how often they want to receive email. The downside? Many people are going to select a frequency that's less often than you want to send to them. The upside? You won't oversend to them, thus increasing the likelihood that they disengage or even unsubscribe. But if you collect the data, USE the data.

 

Follow Basic Email Best Practices: Test creatives, use good subject lines, send on high open rate days, do all of the things that are designed to make your email list respond in optimized ways, and it's likely that they will. That gives you a higher number of engaged users, a better domain and IP reputation ranking, and, most importantly, the best revenue results from your email program.