Email engagement is a measure of how your contacts interact with your emails; every time you send an email, some of your contacts open it, and some of those respond to your call to action by clicking links or buttons. Opens and clicks are an industry standard for tracking email engagement, but they only give you information for a specific email. As your contacts open and click, they develop patterns that can help you better engage with them overall.
 | The data shows: When you collect high-quality contacts through permission-based sign-up tools, send them targeted content, and continuously monitor your reporting to see how your content is performing, your overall email engagement improves. |
Where can I find engagement information for my contacts?
You can view engagement behavior for each contact in your account and get an overall picture of your engagement insights. Follow these steps to:
 | Did you know? Our segmentation tools can also help you find your contacts by their engagement level within a specific contact list or with a certain tag, so you can get the right content in front of the right contacts at the right time. |
What are the different levels of engagement?
Constant Contact breaks engagement down into several categories:
- High / Most engaged - The contacts that regularly open your emails and click the buttons or links.
- Medium / Somewhat engaged - The contacts that sometimes open your emails and click the buttons or links.
- Low / Least engaged- The contacts that rarely open your emails or click the buttons and links.
- Not enough data / Everyone else - The contacts that have received too few emails to measure engagement. This includes new contacts added to your account.
Engagement levels are unique to your account and recalculated each week based on the number of emails you’ve sent, which contacts you’ve targeted for each mailing, your email open rate, and your email click rate.
How do I re-engage contacts with low engagement?
If your engagement rate is low, your audience isn't interested in your content. Here are some things you can do to build a more personal connection with your contacts:
- Send shorter emails more frequently - The days of writing a long newsletter with a little something for everyone are over. Shorter emails with a clear call to action get more attention in the inbox because they take less time to consume. You end up sending more emails overall, but because the content is more targeted, they reach the right part of your audience, too.
- Segment by interest - Try breaking your audience into segments based on their specific needs or interests, and refine your content for each segment. When your email speaks to your audience, your open rates and click rates improve, and therefore your engagement improves too!
- Stand out in the inbox - An engaging subject line and preheader are a powerful combination for grabbing your readers' attention and telling them why it's worth their while to open your email and read further. If you back up your subject line with quality content every time, your audience is more likely to trust your emails and keep opening them.
- Automate your messages - Our Automation Path Builder gives you lots of options to send customized email and SMS content at the right time. Your email and SMS messages are triggered when your contact takes a specific action, and when you build your path, it can be a single message or a series of messages to stretch your engagement out over time.
How do I keep high-engagement contacts engaged?
If your open rates are high and you're getting clicks in your email content, keep doing what you're doing! High engagement from your contacts depends on your own engagement. Spend some time learning about your contacts' interests, and it will help them stay motivated to interact with you.
- Use click segmentation: When a contact clicks a link in your email, you can add them to a list of your choosing. Then you can follow up with additional content that is relevant to everyone who clicked that link.
- Automate based on interest - If a contact takes a specific action, you can automatically send additional content by creating an automation path. This not only helps keep your emails short but also helps you better understand your contacts' interests for more targeted content.
- Reward repeat openers - Rewards don't always have to be monetary, like coupons, loyalty points, or free merchandise! You can offer up exclusive content, sneak peeks, or early access, or even an opportunity to be featured in your next email by sharing a story about how your products or services are helping them.
What do I do with everyone else?
Customer who go out of their way to join your email list want to receive content from you—it's up to you to make the content worth their while. If you haven't been sending to a portion of your contacts, it's time to engage them or let them go. Use engagement to clean your list to remove contacts that you haven't been sending to or that don't have any interest in your emails
- New contacts - First impressions are everything, so the best thing you can do is ensure you have a Welcome Path for new contacts who join your list. A Welcome Path gives you the opportunity to set expectations for what your new contacts just signed up for, when they are already highly engaged. You can even create multiple Welcome Paths to target different audiences with content tailored to them, and your path can be as simple as a single email or as complex as multiple emails or SMS messages.
- Contacts that slipped through the cracks - Check for contacts not on a list and assign them to one to ensure they don't miss emails they might be interested in. You can also send these contacts a targeted email to reconnect, and maybe offer something special, like a coupon, to entice them to re-engage with you.
- Contacts you don't plan to engage with - Having a well-maintained, segmented contact list ensures you can reach the right contacts, with the right message, at the right time. Clean your contact lists by removing inactive, bounced, and unengaged contacts to help your open and click rates go up.
| Did you know? You can engage with all of the new contacts that have joined your list in the last thirty days by clicking on the number in the "New subscribers" box within your Insights. From there, you can either add the contacts to a list or create a custom segment. |