How to Best Manage Email Engagement

How do you measure and what do you measure to improve your email engagement? Let us guide you through the tools you need to collect data and how to read your campaign successes.

Kate Neuer
May 03, 2022

Marketers, whether they are new or seasoned, want to make sure they can manage their email engagement correctly with the right tools in order to send the best email campaigns possible. How can you determine which email campaigns are doing well and which aren't? There are a few different ways you can measure this by tracking your email engagement. 

Though you may not be able to track exactly where your leads look within your email (however, eye-tracking in marketing is a thing), you can track where they click and if they open an email or not. When you know if a user is engaging in your email marketing, you can then move on to improving and measuring other marketing strategies.

This is easier with all-in-one marketing service that can handle your email messaging, websites and landing pages, and even chatbots on all your pages (including social pages). TruVISIBILITY is one of the few affordable, high-converting systems that have an all-in-one marketing suite. Check out how you can track not just emails, but engagement of landing pages and other website pages, for example. That being said, check it out below!

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Table of Contents

What Is Email Engagement?

Email engagement is how many and how often your contacts open or interact with your email. People in marketing generally want to know how many users clicked on sales or deals in the email and how many people opened the email. If certain emails with a particular content do not trigger people to open them, the better your business will fare by leaving that content out in the future. 

Email engagement is simple to measure the metrics of, depending how well your email campaigns are doing. By boosting email engagement, you are essentially increasing your chances of driving more sales. The more clicks your email gets and even the more times people open your campaigns will increase your ability to send more content to subscribers. 

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How to Configure Email Engagement

Some email platforms include a simple page or portal to view the insights of the content your business puts out. You can act on improving sales in the quickest time but simply going to an analytics page and viewing leads or customers who've interacted with your content. 

If you want to know measurements of specific number of people or groups based on activity, you can segment contacts to measure the data of each list separately. You should be able to measure all groups at once as well if you need.

How to Measure Email Engagement

Email marketing is the most valuable type of marketing your business can focus on. On average, email marketing has an ROI of $38 for every $1 spent. But to achieve these goals, you won't be optimizing your marketing efforts if you don't learn who your audience is and increase email engagement. It's no surprise that the more clicks in your email marketing, the better. It's true a lot of this is a result of great messaging or valuable offers to your leads. But then comes the other question: How do you know what to offer your audience? You can learn all of this from email marketing and learning about email engagement. 

Email Engagement Metrics: What You Should Measure

Here is where careful monitoring of your email engagement metrics comes in. When you create a campaign, you have no way of getting into the mind of your subscribers or leads. But through monitoring a variety of data, you’ll be able to see preference patterns and gather information. You can gather such information, depending on the tools at your disposal, such as the number of new users who become subscribers for alerts from your business on average and the demographic of the users who seem to be interested in what your business offers. 

To gather more pertinent information, such as how to make more content or value props your audience and site visitors want to see, the right app can make all the difference. Most email apps will offer some analytics, but to see the most important data, check out TruVISIBILITY's email app. What is great about TruVISIBILITY's platform is that it offers SMS messaging of which you can also view the analytics.

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So, what should you be measuring when it comes to email engagement? Keep in mind certain prerequisites enable email stats to show. When you enable email engagement in your software, you should be able to view all data available after emails have been sent out. Please note that all email platforms are different, so some may not have this as a step you need to do. Some require more to ensure you want to receive data from your sent emails.

Subscribe and Unscubscribe Rates   

Best way to measure email engagement? Your subscribers page or section on any app can give you insight on how many users you may get, which is essentially your lead generation rate. 

Bounce Rate

There are soft bounces and hard bounces when it comes to emails. The amount of time someone doesn't receive your email can hurt your business by hurting your marketing.

Soft bounce rates are usually caused by a subscriber error. This means they may have a full inbox or the files are too large for them to receive. 

Hard bounce rates are more damaging to your marketing efforts (and ultimately sales) because it means a user gave an incorrect email address or you copied the email address incorrectly into a certain segment. Let's say you put in the address of the new user into an email automation list but this person doesn't get it it. This is not good for your deliverability.

Spam Rate

Spam rates are sometimes also referred to as your complaint rates. This is never good because this measures the times a user marked your email messages as spam, meaning your email marketing messages go to their spam folder. If this is the case, you can always remove the contact from your list.

Relapse Rate

Your relapse rate is the percentage of people who, at some point, were re-engaged thanks to a specific re-engagement campaign. See below for a re-engagement campaign example. You've likely received campaigns like this from a brand who wanted to help bring you back into their business by making you want to get something for free or for a low value.

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Image credit: Skillshare

Engagement Rate Over Time

Engagement rates over time measure how much engagement you get from users who open or click on your emails. This is usually measured throughout the day and could be at any time of the day. This type of number should always be included and is common data in free email marketing platforms.

Conversion Rates

Conversion rates will not only tell you how many clicked through your email and clicked on the CTA (call-to-action) button, but it will tell you how many of those recipients made a purchase, confirmed a sign-up, filled out a survey, or downloaded a document or other software your brand may have offered.

List Growth Rates

List growth rates tell you how fast your contact list is growing over a certain time frame. If this isn't offered in an email marketing software, simply take the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribed, and then divide that by the number of email addresses on your list. Then, multiply that number by 100 so you can get your list growth rate.

Email Revenue Rates

Okay, so revenue per email (RPE) will approximately show you how much revenue you get from an email list. To figure this out by individual contact or email sent, divide your total revenue from a campaign by the number of recipients. Don't include those recipients that have an email bounce back.

Email Open Rates

The most common metric people want to learn about will help them categorize their contacts or subscribers. This is known as the email open rates. If you have any type of segmentation, whether with lists of contacts or email automation messages, you should find the open rates for any of these since it is a standard metric every brand will need throughout their line of work.

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How to Increase Email Engagement

Other than making a flashy or enticing subject line and promising great deals with every purchase, for example, are increasing the emails you send and the making you sure you know what types of emails to send more of. It's important to reiterate that your subscribers list will not appreciate too many emails a day. Also, people tend to measure engagement on a weekly schedule. Many marketing firms may do monthly reports, but email marketing chances almost every time a business sends out an email campaign.

Increase Emails You Send

No customer wants to read boring subject lines day in and day out, so no need to send one necessarily every day. You can discover the rate at which you send an email campaign and adjust depending if you send emails too often or not. Great subject lines will make more recipients want to read what you have in your newsletter or sales email.

Know the Time to Send

When you read or measure your email engagement correctly, you will learn what times of the day and even what days most people respond well to your marketing. 

Measure Engagement Regularly

You can do this several ways by either setting a certain time each day or week to measure your email engagement. Or you can simply view the number of opens and clicks from a time period. If you need to build a graph to visually compare certain months or weeks, you are welcome to input email marketing automation data in a graph and regular email in another graph. When you compare the two, see which type of content grabbed user attention better and which seemed to make recipients want to open the email more times.

What's Next?

Now that you understand how to measure audience engagement in email marketing, you’ll want to know how to increase those overall engagement numbers. We hope you feel confident in doing this. It can be done in many different ways, from revamping your email design to increasing overall email personalization. These are simple marketing techniques that TruVISIBILITY can help go over further with articles from the blog segment. 

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You will also want to know what to do with this information and how to store it. Generally, there should be an indicator in your email platform to tell you whether or not the user engagement was good. This could be a green light next to particular set of data or time stamp of when you received the most opens from a campaign.

Check out our other articles on email marketing to learn other tips that can help with marketing email engagement. Whether you want to know about automation or just how many opens your campaigns have within a certain period of time, there are topics that go in depth of how to generate leads, manage leads and customers for customer loyalty, and how to create lead-generating material. No other company wants your business to succeed more than TruVISIBILITY! Check out the Messages app for simple email creation for free today or check out a demo.