Understanding Graymail and Engagement

Graymail is an industry term for email that contacts do not open but have signed up to receive. Graymail is a potentially serious issue for senders, as it is reflective of low engagement.

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Graymail and Reputation

It is imperative to keep an eye on how contacts are engaging with your email. Essentially, sending to unengaged recipients puts your sender domain at risk and increases your chances of hitting a spam trap, or having your sender domain classified as spam. Aside from this spam classification, sending email to contacts who are no longer interested in reading what you have to say can result in sent mail being kept out of the inbox.

Graymail directly impacts your sender reputation with Internet service providers (ISPs). As leads are sent more emails that they do not engage with, mails may be filtered as spam. ISPs have categorization algorithms that determine whether or not your emails are delivered to the inbox. While certain mailbox tabs are no longer the threat they used to be, any mail that does not end up in the inbox is at risk of being ignored outright.
 

Graymail and Engagement

You can prevent sending graymail and protect your domain reputation by actively sending email to engaged recipients. Lead Gen & CRM's engagement score tracks engagement and identifies graymail numbers. Additionally, Lead Gen & CRM shows you how many emails you have left to send to each contact. If you see a contact who once opted in but now has a low engagement score, correspondence with them may be characterized by ISPs as graymail. 

Engagement itself is how you go about fixing a low sender reputation or lists of unengaged recipients. This is because that, unless you know every single recipient well enough to have them safelist IPs and domains, there is no quick fix to graymail. In practice, engagement is a steady process, and you must keep on top of it in order for your reputation and engagement lists to be in their best shape.

Paying attention to contact engagement scores will help you catch those leads before it is too late, so you can go in and change your strategy in an attempt to get their attention. Make sure you are keeping an eye out for the Unengaged and At Risk lists, and be sure to adjust your email marketing strategy when reaching out to contacts that are at risk of being unengaged.  

To maintain a good sending reputation and keep lists of engaged contacts, consider creating engagement and re-engagement campaigns with emails that have relevant information or content that readers will want to interact with.

Again, graymail represents your reputation as a sender and how you engage with leads. Being proactive with minimizing graymail will go a long way.

Questions?